 Great NAS for the Price |
| Review Date: September 10, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Reality, Kansas City, MO USA |
If you are looking to add storage without the hassle of internal drives then this is a great device.
The setup is easy and there are plenty of configuration options via an easy web GUI. It uses the EXT2/linux file system so fragmentation is not a problem.
I have two 1 TB drives set in a raid 0 for testing purposes and this thing screams on a gigabit network.
It is a very small and quiet and looks sleek.
Overall this is the best home/small business diskless NAS system out there. |
Great NAS option, best I've used so far
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| Review Date: December 12, 2008 |
| Reviewer: M. Dickson, Durham & FL |
I've set up perhaps 10 different NAS boxes/servers over the last few years, I have 3 attached to my network currently - this Dlink DNS321 and two LaCie drives. This is by far my favorite for several reasons. For the price, its great that you get an expandable NAS box that supports RAID and any size drives you want to put in there. Its remarkably easy to install the drives, so even if you have no experience installing hard drives into a computer don't worry, its impossible to mess it up as they just slide in - buy OEM drives as you don't need the cables/screws that come in retail boxes. The other big reason I prefer this device over the other NAS drives I have and have had in the past is the speed. By consumer NAS drive standards, its a speed demon. I get roughly 6MBps as a solid connection over my wireless n network with 7.5MBps peaks and 14MBps over my gig LAN connection which are both about 50% faster than either of the LaCie drives that I also have currently connected.
Couple of pieces of advice if you buy this device. If you are only installing 1 drive at first, put it into the right bay as it will make things easier down the road (why? http://support.dlink.com/faq/view.asp?prod_id=2531&question=dns%2D321). Secondly, if you use Mac's, be aware that although these drives work very well with Mac's of course, the software Dlink gives you on the CD is Windows XP/Vista only. Although installing the device is very easy, setting it up isn't what I'd call straight forward so it helps if you've set NAS devices up before. The advice Dlink has on their website for Mac users connecting to the device is for the last version of OS X. But in a nutshell, in Finder, click on 'Go', then 'Connect to Server' and enter 'smb://" and after the // enter the IP address your router has assigned the device. Unlike other NAS devices, this one requires network know-how in that you'll need to setup User/Group permissions whereas some NAS devices give you a pretty GUI which hides this a little, but once you've set it up its a great little network drive. Once I need a couple more TB's, I'll be getting another one. |
Nice to use your own drives
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| Review Date: November 4, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Jay, |
The DNS321 works excellent. Very easy to install drives, easy to set-up, and connected immediately. I wish the mapping tool was installed. I just moved it over from the CD to my local drive. I installed 2 Seagate ES2 500GB and am running RAID1 (mirrored). I used a laptop, and remapped all of 'My Documents' to the network drive. My only complaint is not about the product itself...it's about the speed via wireless. Lack of network performance is not very noticeable when only using the internet, butt when you're transferring large amounts of data, it's much more apparent. I have a DLink N router, and just bought a DLink N card. With the G card I was getting about 1.2 MB/sec, and with the N card I'm getting almost double. It's still slow compared to the wire, which was about 14 MB/sec (still not great). The performance was more of an issue when I was doing the initial transfer of all my files. Now it isn't really a big deal. If I need to transfer a lot of data, I just plug in.
I researched a lot of NAS units, and I deceided that I wanted to select my own hard drives. Most of the units which come with drives, come with cheaper drives. I went with 'commercial' drives which are built to be spinning 24/7. There is, however, a setting in the config firmware site where you can turn off the drives after a certain period of time...similar to your computer. Also, you can set it up to email you when a drive fails. I hope I never receive that email, but it's nice to know that you will be notified immediately. Haven't set up the FTP yet. It did pick up the NAS in iTunes, although I haven't played with it yet.
Anyway, so far, so good. Oh, and be sure you get SATA drives with the newest power connector. |
Ridiculously easy to set up and use
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| Review Date: September 28, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Obnubilated, |
Although I am capable of troubleshooting network attached devices, I don't really want to at home, I just want to store my crap and forget about it. This device requires the extreme bare minimum of effort to use, pretty impressive really. The unit required literally 15 minutes to set up and get working. Most of the time spent was unpacking the unit and the hard drives.
Once it's unpacked and plugged in to your power and your network, all you need to do is run the supplied software from the CD, set your password and choose your disk arrangement. It picks up an IP via DHCP and advertises itself as a UPnP device, so by the time you get the setup disk running, it's already visible on your network (provided you have a standard home router setup going on).
It's super quiet, blends in quietly with the office decor and only has one button to worry about. I've only had it for a week an a half, so I can't speak to it's longevity, but so far the performance is good and I haven't had a single problem.
UPDATE
As many have noted here in the reviews, this device loses its share and permission settings when you reboot. It took me a while to notice this since I leave it on all the time and don't use share permissions at all. This is a very annoying and perplexing bug. I find it hard to believe that something this important would slip by the QA process at Dlink. Thumbs down for that and for not having a firmware update to fix it yet. It's been out for ages already. |
Quick addition and backup security
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| Review Date: January 4, 2009 |
| Reviewer: J. Loden, Valencia, Ca USA |
After running CAT5e cable to many rooms in my home I decided I needed a secure, affordable backup solution for my home network. I purchased the 321 and 2 Seagate 500gb drives to set up a RAID 1 system.
Setup was flawless. Following the quick install guide was easy: I installed the 2 drives, formatted per instructions and chose the RAID 1 configuration. Total process took about 15 minutes, including mapping 2 PC's and a laptop. I do not plan on using the 321 as a media server so I can't attest to the speed in that regard but I did backup over 20 gig of digital photos (13,000 files) in about 14 minutes. I am very pleased. |
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