D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Attached Storage Enclosure by D-Link
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Our Price: $399.00 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $369.00 (click here) Category: CE See more digital camera details and other models |
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Digital camera reviews of D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Attached Storage Enclosure
Digital camera Review: Absolutely terrible
Summary: 1 Stars
This product simply does not work as advertised... Quite literally NONE of the features work. I'm a software development professional, and the amount of tinkering required to get even the most basic of features working was insane. None of the multimedia features work (I've set up various other solutions easily .. this one does not work, period), the print server doesn't work reliably (to the point where you just don't bother). It doesn't support NFS out of the box, and the protocols it does support (Windows networking) do not work well with Linux - that is, it doesn't preserve the file attributes or even file dates! This makes it completely useless as a backup tool. But most importantly, IT IS SLOW. SLOW hardly begins to describe it. It's just slow. Period. I can't imagine how anyone could be happy with this product. But to each their own. I may find use for it as a door stop.Digital camera Review: Amazing for What it's meant to do!
Summary: 5 Stars
This product works great as a NAS. The BitTorrent feature is really handy but doesn't give you as many options as a desktop BitTorrent client (like the ability to choose where it saves the file to) but it still works very well. The UPnP Media Server support is absolutely, utterly broken (at least this is the case with my Xbox 360).
Other than that, this is a great product. It functions very well as a NAS back-up solution and a great way to host media on a home network (as long as you have another computer do the actual streaming).
Digital camera Review: An easy solution for home network storage
Summary: 5 Stars
I got this D-Link DNS-323 and two 1T drives. The setup process is very smooth. I set it RAID 1 mode to make sure the stuff I put into it is safe. Occasionally, I had to restart it to make it work. Somehow, many network components behave like this.Digital camera Review: Awesome NAS For Your Home or Small Office
Summary: 5 Stars
When looking for a NAS drive for my home network, simplicity and redundancy were my primary needs. The D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure is the perfect solution. Although the drive comes with many features and abilities, RAID 1 mirroring (same data is written to both drives for data backup) was the big selling point for me. I have been using a Buffalo LinkStation for the past couple of years, but I have been afraid of a drive failure and so I backed it up on an external USB drive once a month, which was becoming quite a chore. I wanted a new solution that would relieve this manual task once and for all.
I read many reviews about the D-Link DNS-323 and found mostly good things were being said about the enclosure. I decided to give this model a try and I am extremely happy that I did. The enclosure is very impressive looking and feeling. It is constructed of a very solid, brushed aluminum, instead of plastic like many other enclosures are made of. Installation and setup couldn't be much easier, except the software that D-Link provides for this purpose could be a little confusing for non-technically minded folks. I purchased two SATA server drives (7200 RPM), with 16 MB buffers and rated for 1.2 million hours MTBF. They are high duty cycle drives with a 5 year warranty. I want to make sure that these drives will be doing their job for many years to come. I then setup my DNS-323 drive enclosure for a RAID 1 configuration. This means that any data I write to drive 1 is automatically backed up on drive 2. The RAID setup process is very straight forward, using the D-Link CD provided. I have a Gigabit home network so the data transfer rates to and from this NAS are fast. I backed up roughly 210 GB of data from my old Buffalo LinkStation (which also has a Gigabit interface) in just over three hours. This may seem like a lot of time but it was a lot a data, including some very large AVI files. Now that all of my network shared data is on the new D-Link NAS, I am extremely pleased with the data transfer rate of this system. I think the key is to pair good high performance drives with this enclosure. Adding older, slower drives would certainly hurt performance of an otherwise outstanding device.
The DNS-323 packs some great features, for those who wish to do more with this enclosure than I do. It has a built in USB print server, a built-in FTP file server (for file access over the Internet), UPnP AV Server for Streaming Music, Photos, and Video to Compatible Media Players, built-in iTunes music server capabilities, and the drive(s) can be setup for file share restrictions; allowing specific folder access, data size limitations, etc. The enclosure allows you to customize your drive configurations; including standard, JBOD (linear), RAID 0 and RAID 1. The power management features are great as well, allowing you to set the drives to spin down when not accessed for a specific period of time. I have mine set to spin down the drives after 20 minutes of inactivity. The drives spin back up automatically as soon as someone on the network tries to access the NAS data. You can setup a large number of user groups/accounts and can customize the access rights of any of these users. Quite an impressive array of features for such a low cost NAS enclosure.
No tools are required to setup your DNS-323 storage enclosure. The front cover lifts right off, revealing the two SATA hard drive slots. You simply push your hard drive(s) into the empty slots and replace the front cover. Plug in the included power adapter and plug the NAS into your network using the included blue Ethernet cable, or a CAT 6 (CAT 5 is sufficient if you are only using 10 or 100 Mbps) cable of your own. To release the drives from the enclosure you lift the front cover off, to expose the drives, and lift up on the appropriate drive release lever on the back of the DNS-323. The drive pops loose and you simply slide it out. It's that simple! You pop in the included CD, which guides you through a fairly simple setup process for the enclosure. It will also assist you in mapping the new drive(s) to your computer(s). The setup utility runs directly from the CD-ROM, so there is no software that needs to be installed on each client computer on your network.
You honestly can't beat the simplicity, feature packed, quality built D-Link DNS-323. I got mine for under $200.00. Be prepared to spend more on your hard drives than you do on the drive enclosure itself. Of course you can use some spare SATA drives that you may have laying around the house of office, but I highly recommend buying some new, high performance drives for this great NAS device. I couldn't be happier with my new D-Link NAS drive system, and I highly recommend this device for anyone looking for a simple, secure, feature packed data sharing system for their home or small office network. I am planning to play around with the iTunes and FTP server features in the future, but for now we just use this NAS to store Outlook PST data, pictures, MP3 files, AVI files, Word and Excel files, and some shared databases. It was the perfect solution for our home, and now I don't have to worry about drive failure since all of the data is written to both drives in the enclosure. I'm usually not much of a D-Link fan, but the D-Link DNS-323 2-bay network storage enclosure is a top notch product!
Digital camera Review: Awesome!
Summary: 4 Stars
I just got this unit yesterday and havent had a whole lot of time to test everything out. First thing I did was get the newest firmware installed and its a great improvement. I am using 2 Samsung Spinrite T-series 500GB Hard drives in the NAS in a RAID 1 config. They are fast as heck and very quiet, in fact the only noise I can hear is a faint one from the fan on the back of the unit. I would definately suggest this unit to anyone for home or work that needs an easy to setup and use backup system that can be accessed from any networked computer or even setup the ftp server and access it from anywhere. The included backup software needs some improvement but thats it. I have no trouble accessing the nas from my xp machine or my vista ultimate machine, both found it right away and had no problem mapping the drive! Great buy especially with the RAID 1 mirroring option you cant get on most external hard drive systems.