The administrator can control disk space as well as what a user can do with the provided storage space. The DNS-323 supports user management with accounts, group, and quotas. Other than the formatting, it's very quick and self-explanatory to set up other features. In our case, it took about 5 minutes for a drive of 400GB. The formatting takes a relatively short time depending on the size of the hard drives. This makes the user-replaceable aspect of the device less flexible. For all the NAS devices (of which the hard drives are user-replaceable) we've reviewed to date, the DNS-323 is the first that supports only the Ext2 file format.
#D link dns 323 nas windows#
This can also be potentially problematic in case the DNS-323 fails and you want to just hook its hard drives to a Windows computer for data access or recovery. This means it's impossible to move an existing Windows/Mac-friendly hard drive into the DNS-323 without having its data completely wiped. If you have hard drives laying around that are formatted in FAT32 or NTFS file system (supported by Microsoft Windows), the DNS-323 will need to reformat them into Ext2 file system (supported by Linux) before they can be used. If you want to use hard drives that already contain data, however, it's a different story. If you get new hard drives for the DNS-323, all these options work very well and the setup is very convenient. Then again, RAID 1 offers even better data security (at the expense of storage capacity, of course) and is probably the best option for a backup solution. In short, if you want to maximize your storage space and have a bit more peace of mind about data integrity, then JBOD is a better choice over RAID 0. JBOD's performance, though, is much slower than RAID 0. (With RAID 0, the combined storage is always the size of the smaller hard drive multiplied by two.) Also, if one hard drive in a JBOD setup dies, only data on that hard drive is lost and it's possible-though not always-to recover information on the working one. JBOD combines the drives in a linear way, meaning the combined storage is the total of the two hard drives even when they are of different sizes. JBOD (Just A Bunch of Disks) is an interesting setup that, similar to RAID 0, merges two hard drives. There are four options: No RAID, RAID 0 (Striped), RAID 1(Mirrored) or JBOD.
#D link dns 323 nas install#
Nonetheless, the D-Link still comes with a very clear, well-illustrated Quick Install Guide that most people wouldn't need to read.Īt the initial login, the Web application will prompt you to set up the drives. Its Web interface is very well organized and intuitive with a lot of built-in help, tips, and useful information. Of the many networking vendors, D-Link has always been our favorite in terms of how its Web-based management applications are designed. In our case, the Easy Search Utility found the NAS within a few seconds and helped us launch the configuration Web page. Once the hard drives are installed, it's very easy to set up the DNS-323 on your network with D-Link's Easy Search Utility (included on the bundled CD). You can use just one drive with the DNS-323, but if you want to take advantage of the RAID configuration, the second one is a must. There's a release latch for each drive at the back of the device, in case you want to replace the hard drives. The device can take two 3.5-inch SATA hard drives, preferably of regular thickness: all you have to do is to slide the drives in and they fit in very well. Fortunately, NAS devices are generally not supposed to be portable, and the act of opening the cover doesn't interfere with the D-Link's working status. It would be a lot better if the DNS-323's face lid had some sort of lock to prevent this. More than once we accidentally opened the cover just by holding the device from the front to lift it up. It's very easy to open the device to access its hard drive bays. The DNS-323 doesn't come with hard drives-leaving you the option to choose what storage capacity to add. On the front is the hard-drive bay cover that has the power button and three blue activity status LEDs, one for each hard drive and one for the network port. The D-Link-DNS-323 boasts a simple, compact design with all the ports (Gigabit Ethernet, USB, and power) on the back.