Some of you may remember me asking back in March if anyone had any NAS recommendations. I finally came across a solution that I think is going to serve me well. I picked up a D-Link DNS-323 NAS and a couple Seagate 500GB SATA/300 drives
to fill the dual bay D-Link enclosure. The total investment was right at $360 - not too shabby for a terabyte’s worth of data.
One of the reasons I chose the D-Link was because of it’s RAID options. It offers RAID-0, RAID-1, and JBOD. I am currently using RAID-1, which is just disk mirroring. This way if/when one drive fails, the other just takes over and since it’s a mirror of the other disk, all data is safe and secure. This does not protect me if I happen to accidentally delete some files, as the mirrored disk will have those same files removed. To combat this, I’m thinking of buying another DNS-323 unit to serve as a backup unit to my first DNS-323
unit. This way I can do a nightly differential rsync on this secondary unit and I will again have a highly redundant storage system.
In regards to setup and install, it was very easy and straightforward. D-Link provided a “Quick-Install” guide that walked me through it. Basically, you insert both your drives into the enclosure, connect the network and power cables and power it on. No tools are necessary for drive installation or removal. Once the unit is powered on, you can use the included D-Link Easy Search utility which will find the DHCP IP address that unit was assigned. From there, you open a browser and connect to the NAS via the web interface. Basically, set up just consists of choosing which RAID option you would like (if any) and formatting the drives. Once that was done, the unit was ready to be accessed from any Windows PC via a standard shared drive.
I’ve had the NAS for a week now and I have to say I’ve been very happy with it so far. I would definitely highly recommend this NAS enclosure and the drives of your choice to anyone. It’s definitely a much more budget friendly NAS when compared to other similar products like the NetGear ReadyNAS or any of the Buffalo TerraStation’s.
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