D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Attached Storage Enclosure: Digital-Cameras-Photo.com

D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Attached Storage Enclosure

D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Attached Storage Enclosure
by D-Link

Our Price: $399.00
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $369.00 (click here)
Category: CE
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Customers in the UK, buy this product at amazon.co.uk for British Pounds

Digital Photo Product Details

Manufacturer: D-Link
Format: CD
Platform: Windows
Model: DNS-323
Product features:

Secure and share your digital files
Insert one or two internal 3.5 SATA hard drives without tools or cables
Protect your important files with mirrored hard drives using RAID 1 technology
Access stored files over the Internet
Hard drives not included

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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Attached Storage Enclosure

Customer 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!

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Description of D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Attached Storage Enclosure

The D-Link ShareCenter 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure (DNS-323) connects to your network instead of to a computer so everyone on your network can back up content to one central location. Plus, it lets you share your stored content across your network and over the Internet so family members, friends and employees can access it no matter where they are.

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