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D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure | List Price: $229.99
Discount Price: $174.99
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Brand: D-Link
Binding: Electronics
Warranty: 1 year warranty
Features: - Secure and share your digital files
- Insert one or two internal 3.5 SATA hard drives without tools or cables
- Protect your important files with mirrored hard drives using RAID 1 technology
- Access stored files over the Internet
- Hard drives not included
Steer clear. [Posted on 2008-05-19]
Steer clear of this product. I purchased in December 2007 after careful consideration of options and features. Very long story short is as follows:
1) Customer support stinks.
2) Device does not stay connected to LAN.
3) MS-Backup utility is prevented from setting archive bit (even after updating the unit) hence you cannot do incremental backups.
This was the biggest waste of money, and even more precious, time!
Steer clear. I stopped using this piece of junk! It cost me $180 for the unit and $85 for the drive for a grand total loss of $265. Thanks for nothing D-Link.
Neat Little Unit [Posted on 2008-05-30]
With firmware 1.05 (just released) this unit now has support for jumbo frames and a bit torrent client. I've done some very easy "hacking" (put a file in the root directory via FTP and reboot). I've been using MediaTomb to stream movies to my PS3 with no issue. The unit seems fast for mass data storage, spins drives down as advertised, runs dead quiet, and build quality is great.
Granted I mostly use it as a media repository, but so far (3 weeks) I am very pleased.
Overall a great product [Posted on 2008-06-18]
Overall this product is great, I replaced a Netgear SC-101 that I had for several years, and was immediately impressed. The old Netgear had problems with the mirrors become un-synced, the only fix was to copy everything off the box, reformat everything and copy it all back. This was especially a pain given the dog slow interface of the Netgear product. This box on the other hand is lightning fast!!! I had some initial problems setting the box up on the 1.03 firmware it came with; however after obtaining the latest firmware, setup went smooth as silk. I highly recommend before you do anything to the box, get and install the latest firmware. I have really hammered this box, doing things I know would have muddled the mirrors on the Netgear product and this D-Link never missed a beat. The many features are incredible, an iTunes server, UPnP server, FTP server and more. While I did not buy the box for any of these features, I did setup the UPnP server and it works as advertised. Be advised though that it does not provide any transcoding capabilities. Having said all that, I am very impressed and happy with the purchase. I have since found that the box runs on a Linux platform, and there are devoted sites on the net that provide tips on improving capabilities and adding new features that I will be pursuing at some point. Thanks D-Link, a great product at a more than reasonable price.
Serves its purpose [Posted on 2008-07-01]
The network attached storage (NAS) does all that it asked of it, only a bit slower.
There are those who have reviewed the item and claim that it does not work OS X, but this is not true. The trick is to make sure your network settings are configured to match the same workgroup that the NAS is configured to. At the moment I am running the newest version of OS X (10.5.4) and it sees, recognizes, and easily read-writes to the drives in the NAS.
My only gripe about the device is its latency issues. I was putting quite a bit of strain on its networking capacity by using it as the primary repository for an fairly large iTunes library (approaching 200GB). However, with the constant updating, downloading, and playback of both video and audio, iTunes would choke. I am forced into looking back at configuring a dedicated computer with a bit more horsepower to run my iTunes storage/server again. I was really hoping that the power footprint would be an attractive feature of the device, but the networking demands were just too much of a drawback to use it to it's fullest potential.
The built-in iTunes server software limits the hands-on data control I need, so it has been left unused.
I'll wind up using this only as backup. All my machines will be able to access the data if necessary. The hardware built in is just not as robust as I was hoping.
Cheap NAS, works well [Posted on 2008-07-17]
Physically, the box is nice and small and is a perfect stand for my cable modem.
Installation was painlessly easy. Just inserted a 750gb drive and off it went.
You definitely want to upload the latest firmware from DLink to get the most functionality.
The only other thing I'd recommend would be to get a gigabit router. Copying big files over 100baseT is awfully slow, compared to what the box can do at 1kBaseT. If you think the transfer is slow compared to your other external harddrives, upgrade to gigabit.
As for functionality, it's awesome. We now keep our digital pictures there, so that anyone can upload new digital photos from their cameras from their own computer. I no longer need to keep my main PC on to serve that purpose.
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