Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
(108 customer reviews) 151 of 151 people found the following review helpful
One of the better home NAS devices,
October 23, 2008 smoove (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: D-Link DNS-321 2-Bay Network Attached Storage (Personal Computers)
I've been pleased with the reliability and performance of the DNS-321. I was hoping the Gigabit transfer speeds would be significantly faster, but it seems to top out at 14-16 MBps (MegaBytes per sec). This is on the upper end of most consumer NAS boxes, including D-Link's tried & true DNS-323.
Pros:
. Runs cool & quiet.
. Spins down the HD when idle to conserve power.
. Rock-solid operation (no reboots necessary in the month I've had it).
Cons:
. Larger drives (1TB and up) can get "stuck" at 94% during the format phase, but eventually it will complete.
. User permissions setup is clunky. This is common among consumer-level NAS boxes though.
. User access permissions are cleared on reboot :(
. No firmware update yet (v1.0). D-Link tech support says they've fixed most of the problems above and are testing the new firmware for public release. The cons are relatively minor to me, and once fixed in firmware, this will be a...Read more
162 of 170 people found the following review helpful
5 stars for nice features, overall 0 stars for corrupting my data,
March 12, 2009 S. Kosto - See all my reviews
This review is from: D-Link DNS-321 2-Bay Network Attached Storage (Personal Computers)
Well, it was working fine for the features I was using. Immediately updated to their latest firmware release. Put 2 1TB drives in it, all the backup options (rebuild drive, etc.) seemed fine as I played around with swapping drives out. Then I tried to copy all of my current data over to this NAS box. After about a full day of copying (I have several hundred gigs of files) I went to check the status of the backup.
The backup had completed... HOWEVER, since I had turned on data validation (rereads the destination and source files and compares after the backup) it noted that out of the 1000s of files I had backed up that 12 of them were "not equivalent to the source files".
I took down the names of the files and then did a hex dump compare of the old and new files. To my surprise the files that were copied onto the NAS box had *exactly* 76 bytes of zero in very specific relative offsets in each file. It was always at hex offsets with the last 3 nibbles of the file...Read more
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful
Small business? stay away from this one,
March 8, 2009 IT Administrator - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: D-Link DNS-321 2-Bay Network Attached Storage (Personal Computers)
I bought this to test as an inexpensive file server in a small business, so I cannot comment about the UPnP server, FTP server, etc.
The unit ships with firmware v1.00, but that firmware has problems (RAID, large drive, fan settings, etc.) that are well documented, but firmware v1.01 was released in October 2008, and was supposed to fix those issues.
I immediately updated the firmware to v1.01 and began to test the RAID for reliability, etc. It turns out that v1.01 broke some important items for me - most notibly the permissions. As soon as you create a single user, the ability to select "All accounts" disappears. Further, every time you reboot the unit, you will lose all of the permissions that you set up. This is a bug, and D-Link is well aware of it since early November 2008 - you can read about it on their forums. It is now early March 2009, and they have not released an updated firmware.
I have it turned off and sitting on the shelf waiting for a...Read more
