Product Description

D-Link DNS-323 2 Bay Network Storage EnclosureThe D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure enables users at home or in the office to share documents such as music, photos and videos across the network and on the Internet, so family members, friends, or employees can gain access to them. In the office, this enclosure also provides a central network point to back up valuable files and protect them from drive failure by using the built-in RAID 1 mirroring technology. At home, this device can be used to stream music, photos and videos to UPnP AV compatible network media players. If you deploy the DNS-323 storage enclosure in your home or office, you will be able to centrally store files on the network, ready for access locally or over the Internet. This will allow you to benefit from the new high performance SATA technology, enabling you to back up important documents or play photo, music and video collections via a Media Player, at an affordable cost. The D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure enables users at home or in the office to share documents such as music, photos and videos across the network and on the Internet, so family members, friends, or employees can gain access to them. In the office, this enclosure also provides a central network point to back up valuable files and protect them from drive failure by using the built-in RAID 1 mirroring technology. At home, this device can be used to stream music, photos and videos to UPnP AV compatible network media players. If you deploy the DNS-323 storage enclosure in your home or office, you will be able to centrally store files on the network, ready for access locally or over the Internet. This will allow you to benefit from the new high performance SATA technology, enabling you to back up important documents or play photo, music and video collections via a Media Player, at an affordable cost. Features:Up to 2 SATA standard drives of any capacity si

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4096 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: D-Link
• Model: DNS-323
• Released on: 2006-11-12
• Platform: Windows
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 39.37" h x 23.62" w x 78.74" l, 2.69 pounds

Features

• 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure
• 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure

Manufacturer's Description

2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure
The D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure enables users at home or in the office to share documents such as music, photos and videos across the network and on the Internet, so family members, friends, or employees can gain access to them. In the office, this enclosure also provides a central network point to back up valuable files and protect them from drive failure by using the built-in RAID 1 mirroring technology. At home, this device can be used to stream music, photos and videos to UPnP AV compatible network media players (See Notes Below).

Convenience, Performance and Flexibility

The DNS-323 allows for up to two 3.5" SATA hard drives of any capacity (See Notes below). Tools or cables are not required to install the hard drive(s), simplifying the setup process significantly. Four different hard drive modes are available, allowing users and administrators to choose the configuration best suited to their needs:
1) Standard mode: creates two separately accessible hard drives; 2) JBOD: combines both drives in a linear fashion for maximum space efficiency; 3) RAID 0: combines both drives in a "striped" configuration, which provides the highest performance, enabling speeds of up to 23MBps-read and 15MBps-write (184/120Mbps respectively) when using a Gigabit Ethernet connection; 4) RAID 1: makes the drives mirror each other, for back-up purposes. If one drive fails while configured as RAID 1, the unaffected drive continues to function as a single drive until the failed drive is replaced.
In addition, the DNS-323 includes a USB Print Server for printing from any computer on the network and a fan to prevent overheating.

Safe-file sharing locally or over the Internet
Based on the Internet Protocol (IP), the DNS-323 is not tied to any particular operating system and is suitable for use in Windows, MAC or Unix environments.
The DNS-323 includes an FTP server4, allowing files to be accessed remotely over the Internet. Users and/or groups may be configured and assigned to folders with either read or read/write permissions. With access rights defined in this way, data can be kept safe in either the home or office environment. Quotas can also be allocated to each user/group to limit their amount of storage.

Content Streaming To A Media Player or iTunes Software
At home, once music, photo and video collections have been saved on to the DNS-323 for safekeeping, the built-in UPnP AV media server may be used to stream the content to compatible media players, such as those found in D-Link's MediaLounge product line. This feature provides high levels of convenience as it does not require a computer to be turned on.
The DNS-323 also features an iTunes Server. When enabled, the DNS-323 will be automatically detected in the iTunes program, which means the software will be able to find and play music directly from the DNS-323.

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Customer Reviews

Good experience
I have been running a D-Link DNS-323 NAS for well over a year now and it's actually been a pleasant experience. I bought it to replace a Netgear SC-101 which basically annoyed the hell out of me because of the need to load special software on each PC wanting to access it, and repeated reliability problems. The beauty of the D-Link device is that you configure it via a web browser and then any PC or Mac on the network can access it as a regular share. So in Windows you simply 'map' a drive and point it to the IP address of the D-Link NAS and the volume name you've given it, couldn't be simpler. Likewise with the Mac you just choose 'connect to server' enter the IP address and volume name and that's it.

At it's simplest, which is how I use it, anyone on the network has read/write access to the whole device and the two 500Gb drives I have installed are combined into a single 1Tb storage space. There are options for combining the drives using RAID-0 (striping) or RAID-1 (mirroring), alternatively you can simply keep your two drives as separate disks. Also, you can define users and groups and use these to control access to anything from the whole device down to individual folders. There are also FTP and Media Sharing services built-in although I personally haven't needed to use these. One further option is a power saving mode which I would recommend (if only to make the device more eco-friendly). After a user defined period of time the drives will spin down if they aren't being accessed, and will spin up automatically the next time you access them. I set the spin down period to 45 minutes which seems a good compromise, so essentially the device is 'dormant' overnight after I've run my daily backup.

My only criticism is that after about 9 months one of the two little LEDs that indicates disk activity, failed but the device still works perfectly. I'm fortunate in that I haven't had any of the reliability problems experienced by other reviewers here, the drive just sits there and does what it does, possibly because I upgraded to the latest firmware. For those feeling a bit more adventurous, there's a DNS-323 community who have developed enhancements and new features for the embedded Linux that this thing uses is it's operating system, although I haven't found the need to go down this route.

As always, any hard disk based device carries a risk of mechanical failure or corruption, for example out of eight Maxtor hard disks I purchased and used in PCs over three years, SIX of them failed. Conversely of all the Samsung drives I've purchased, not one has let me down and I have two 500Gb Samsung drives installed in my D-Link NAS.

All in all I would recommend it based on my experience, it's ease of configuration, (relatively) quiet operation and wide (PC/Mac) compatibility when accessing it across the network.

Initial problems, but good experience now
I've had the DNS-323 for at least a year now and had a few initial problems in the first few months with it always needing rebooting, as it disappeared from the network devices regularly. I've never had any data errors though. Then I updated the firmware and, ever since then, it has run perfectly. I have 2x 500GB drives in it, configured as RAID-0, though I wish I hadn't bothered as I have read elsewhere that on this device it doesn't appear to give any speed increase - I haven't tested this myself though.

However, it works great, and does exactly what I want. I have it hooked up to a home network throughout the house via powerline ethernet and it can easily stream both DivX and DVD files to a media player elsewhere in the house with no delays. Copying 700MB across the network to it takes 86 seconds, which I thought was pretty fast, and excellent for backups from my PCs.

I don't know about the LEDs (never realised they were there), since it just sits in a corner hidden away. I fully expect one of the hard drives to eventually fail of course, meaning the entire RAID will disappear, but I'm well aware of that and have backups elsewhere on DVD.

I would definitely recommend it, as long as you make sure you have up to date firmware. It's pretty quiet, especially hiding in the corner. I haven't actually set it up to spin down the disks, but it sounds like a good idea which I'll probably try.

It's a pity some people have had bad experiences shown in the other comments. Hopefully the latest firmware has ironed out all of the issues, but as I say, I'm very happy with it.

Great product, easy setup
I bought this from Amazon, and added a 1.5TB Seagate to the order. Plugged the drive into the enclosure (very easy from the front), plugged it into the network, and started it up. Came up on my network immediately with a DHCP address, and I just used the web browser to configure it. One caveat at first was that the 1.5B drive was reported as 0k size, which was a bit worrying, especially since the formatting took maybe 20 mins. But when that was done the drive worked fine. I checked D-Link's support website and found that the latest firmware supports 1.5TB drives correctly, installed it (again very easy via the web interface), and the size of the drive was reported correctly. As a file server it works fantastic, configure it in the same workgroup as your home PCs and you can find it in "My network places". I haven't tried the other services (FTP/iTunes server etc.) so no idea how well those work, but for my requirements this is a fantastic little product.