D-Link DNS-321 Diskless System 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure

Pros: I have two DNS-321 units each with two Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB drives config'd as RAID1. I'm using them as 'Backup-to-disk folders' in Backup Exec, rotating one of them off-site each week. Physicall installation was very simple and the LAN setup required going through a straightforward html based wizard which took about five minutes. There are other features (ftp hosting, iTunes, quotas, user permissions, etc.) that I'm not using, but as a RAID1 redundant external hard drive I'm plased.

Cons: The Seagate drives I'm using are listed on the D-Link website as being recommended, but they are slimmer than the drive bays in the DNS-321. I used a piece of the packing foam to keep the drives from rattling around in the enclosure. Not that big of a deal, but a spring or clip of some sort provided by d-link would be better than my foam hack-job.

Pros: Fast easy setup. Pop in the disks and walk through the web pages. Took me about 5 minutes to set up 500Mb of RAID-1 storage. Excelent value for money. E-mail alerts are a nice plus.

Cons: Only has SMB/CIFS and ftp servers. We use Solaris and MacOS as well as Windows. It would be nice if the DNS-321 supported NFS. This is a minor negative as adding SMB support to Solaris isn't difficult. sftp would be far more useful than ftp and should be very easy for D-link to add.

Overall Review: MacOS works well with the DNS-321, but it isn't covered in the D-Link documentation. The DNS-321 runs linux. It is possible to modify the boot script. Google DNS-323 wiki for details. I haven't tried it as I'd rather not hack my primary back-up device.

Pros: Works perfectly straight out of the box. No messing around or problems configuring anything. Just works!

Cons: None yet. Aside from a tiny issue mentioned below.

Overall Review: If you are planning on streaming to an XBOX 360 or a PS3 with this device, the latest firmware (1.01) has a slight bug. You subnets third octet can't be a 0. For some reason that stops the streaming process. So make sure if you have 192.168.0.xxx make sure you change that to something like 192.168.1.xxx - Small inconvenience, but may be useful for some people.

Pros: This is a great little unit at a great price! It was very easy to set up - I put in 2 1TB drives. The interface was easy to use and it took only a few minutes to set up (then about an hour and a half to format the drives).

Cons: The fan does run all the time and it is a bit noisy. But, the drives stay nice and cool. It would have been better if they would have put a temp sensor that would spin up the fan as needed. But for the price, it works for me. I have the unit sitting in another room next to the router so i don't even hear it.

Overall Review: I couldn't be happier with the purchase. Very easy, I get good performance - fast transfer rates and I can even listen to music (with no choppy audio) stored on the unit while also doing other data transfers.

Pros: Good Performer. Polite tech service on phone. First call tech service did not know of the new firmware. Second time a winner.

Cons: Would not work with 1.5 T Seagates. Tech service said cannot work with drives of that size. Googled and found firmware update. Tech service had to help install v 1.01. Voila.. works perfectly as a RAID1

Overall Review: Tech service needs better training although they were patient and pleasant.

Pros: Works great with my 2 Samsung F1 1TB drives. The 321 formatted them quickly and was up and running in no time. Relatively quiet. Small form factor. Metal case. Runs cool so far. Supports plug-ins, which can allow for more features (SSH, etc) but I haven't tried this yet as I'm not sure how it impacts the warranty. Seems to be fairly configurable.

Cons: Only supports SMB shares. Would prefer NFS support for usage with Linux. SSH not supported out of the box. I've read that user permissions might not work well with various OSes but I have not confirmed this for myself.

Overall Review: I upgraded to the latest firmware version (1.01 at this time) before formatting the discs. This firmware version fixes some bugs and also enabled Jumbo frames support.

Pros: low power: <5W with no disks; 10-20W during use with 2x WD 1TB Green; power management options quiet: little fan makes hardly any noise; find some disks that are quiet quick: gigabit ethernet; reasonable throughput over CIFS/Samba; great over NFS(see cons) small: whole unit isn't very big, yet disks have space around them convenient physical setup: just slide in the 3.5" SATA disks; more room around disks than a typical 3.5" housing in computers means good circulation pretty: it's small and has a pretty blue light on the front of it so you could leave it on a desk easy: put the disks in and point your browser to it; if you know what you want, setup takes about 15 minutes plus some time for formatting large disks; see cons loads of services: CIFS/Samba/My Network, music server, FTP, video server; see cons hackable: product is missing some services, but most of them can be compensated for (see fun_plug)

Cons: firmware update tedious: you must download updates from D-Link manually and then upload it to the device limited CIFS/Samba/Network Neighborhood: web configuration limits the share names and user access a bit, though I don't know the extent missing services: no telnet, SSH, NFS by default; must install some 3rd party software to get these going; good thing is that the people who want these services are probably capable of installing the software setup is complex: takes a some knowledge or a techie friend to set it up well; minimum information needed to set it up to start storing stuff is a little backwards; device lacks a super hand-holding setup path for very simple scenarios

Overall Review: UPDATE YOUR FIRMWARE FIRST THING! This is a great little device, especially with people losing interest in desktop systems which can fit full-sized drives in them. Network performance is satisfactory for something this compact and power-friendly. With redundancy on a couple of large disks, this would be great non-portable storage for a laptop user. It is possible to get to the data from the internet, too. You can leave it out in the open or next to all your internet hardware, since it's quiet and pretty. Easy to set up as a music server which should work with computers or dedicated music hardware on a stereo. It can also serve video to media devices. This thing is a real budget NAS device. Can do a lot better, but will pay a whole lot more. The creators did a true service by making the software easily hackable. All of the software limitations can be overcome because of this, and any people that will need to do that will find it easy enough.

Pros: This little and cheap NAS is great and does everything I wanted it to do. I set it up at home to be a place to store my music and video with the rest of my network, in particular to stream 720p and 1080p quality movies to my TV via a briteview media player I had just bought. The iTunes music server works flawlessly.

Cons: Only con, as others have noted, is that copying files to the device is a bit slow - I get about 6 MB/s transfer speed. Not a big deal in the long run, but when you first get this thing and want to copy all your stuff on to it you'll probably have a long wait. If this is the only con, which it is IMO, then you'll be getting a great product for its price.

Overall Review: Some other reviewer stated that they didn't like the fact that this NAS would send you e-mails only if you entered an SMTP server and he didn't want to run an SMTP server on his home network. This guy seriously needs some education. I'll explain. Every computer that sends e-mails needs an SMTP server to do it. This is why every ISP provides an SMTP server for its customers. So, just enter the SMTP server IP address that your ISP gave you and all will be well. Also, some people on here complained about firmware updates not being released. Since their complaints D-Link *has* released more firmware versions. Make sure you update to the latest firmware before you format the drives since you'll want to use EXT3, not EXT2, and you can only get EXT3 if you get the latest firmware.