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Just bought a DLink DNS-323

So NCIX was having another one of their sales again.  This time the deals were pretty good.

The DLink DNS-323 is a network-attached storage enclosure that holds 2 SATA drives.  I decided to buy 2 1-terabyte Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives which were also on sale.

DLink_DNS-323_Volume_1IMG_0073IMG_0074IMG_0075IMG_0076

For the past little while, we’ve been mostly using stand-alone drives with USB enclosures.  Some of them we’ve bought as a retail package.  Others, we’ve bought the drive first and then slapped an enclosure around it.  But all are USB-attached and provide no fault tolerance.

Herein lies the appeal of the DNS-323.  This unit can take 2 SATA drives and can use them in the following configurations:

For our purposes, we will be storing some valuable data (pics, videos, etc.) on this unit so reliability, redundancy and fault-tolerance is top priority.  I opted, therefore, to configure this in RAID 1.

Installation was a breeze – install hard drives, connect to router and power up.  I did have a problem with my VMWare Server’s built-in DHCP server assigning the DNS-323 an IP address.  The DNS-323 was supposed to get its IP address from my Linksys WRT54G router instead.  Luckily, the DNS-323’s included software has a tool to find your unit on the network.  Once I found the unit on the network, I accessed its web-based configuration interface and assigned a static IP address.

The DNS-323 has a built-in FTP server, iTunes server, BitTorrent client and also acts as a UPnP AV media server.  The DNS-323 runs Linux and is accessible via Telnet.  For more info on the DNS-323, you can visit the Wiki.

The bottleneck with our setup will most likely be our network until we can upgrade our router to Gigabit Ethernet.  My aging WRT54G is only a 100 Mbps router.  So transferring files from my computer to the DNS-323 will run at 12.5 megabytes per second at the fastest.  It will most likely be around 10 MB/s.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Life, Programming, Technology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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4 Responses to “Just bought a DLink DNS-323”

  1. nice little new toy vinny! i have a couple of questions.

    1. how noisy is the setup?
    2. are the drives hot-swappable?
    3. how much did this setup cost?
    4. what is the maximum size of drive that the unit can handle?

  2. @neil:
    1. there is a small exhaust fan blowing air out the back. It is noisiest when the unit “wakes up” and drives spin up. Otherwise, it’s the usual drone sound. I have power management set up to spin the drives down after 5 min. inactivity. Anyhow, it’s in the closet with our router and modem so we can’t barely hear it.

    2. AFAIK, SATA drives are supposed to be hot-pluggable. However, DLink recommends powering down after a hard drive failure in RAID 1 mode. Of course, a disk failure in RAID 0 mode is catastrophic.

    3. 2×1TB drive @ $150/ea = $300. Enclosure = $139. With taxes = $491.65

    4. The DNS-323 has been around long before Terabyte drives came around. I don’t know of any maximum size. I don’t foresee problems supporting upcoming 1.5TB drives.

    With drives becoming larger and larger, the impact of drive failure becomes greater and greater. Look for NAS enclosures that support RAID 1 to become increasingly more popular. For the money, the DNS-323 is pretty tough to beat.

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