Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
(267 customer reviews) 590 of 599 people found the following review helpful
The little NAS that could,
December 8, 2007 YSC "ciac" (Mamaroneck, NY) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Attached Storage Enclosure (Personal Computers)
I needed a network storage, and I wanted some degree of user-extensibility (hackable). After much research, DNS-323 became an obvious choice, at least based on specification, figures, reviews and user reports. The budget was under $200, and it's incredible how expensive NAS boxes are in general.
Here are some models I considered and why they didn't make the cut:
Linksys Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives NSLU2 an amazingly flexible NAS that's also cheap. It has a very large and healthy development community for its hacks. However it requires external enclosure and is much slower. NSLU2 also doesn't spin down the drives by default (reports say you can with some tweaks). Has the least functions out of the box. Very tempting alternative however, due to its being a favorite platform for hackers/developers and consequently a...Read more
156 of 173 people found the following review helpful
Unreliable/unable to recover from hard drive failure,
March 25, 2008 C. Gafton (CT, USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Attached Storage Enclosure (Personal Computers)
The D-Link DNS-323 is a dual SATA enclosure, boasting an embedded Linux running on a Marvel board with an ARM5 processor. You put in the drives, and it configures them using the software raid stack from its embedded Linux. It has gigabit ethernet, and as NAS functionality goes, it only supports SMB shares. That's about where the coolness ends - with the specs. Even though it runs Linux, it is not capable of serving NFS. Even though it runs Linux, it is not capable of using ext3. But I am getting ahead of myself.
First thing I had to do based on the advice pouring from the Internet was to upgrade its firmware to the latest and greatest 1.0.4. Then I put in my 2 x 1TB drives and I started configuring it. The web interface gives the usual choice of jbod/raid0/raid1 - and after choosing raid1, it asked me how much RAID1 I want, promising that the rest will be used for a JBOD setup. I selected a 500GB setup for RAID1, which gave me an extra 1TB of JBOD scratch space I planned on...Read more
348 of 397 people found the following review helpful
Why you should not buy this product,
October 2, 2007 Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay Network Attached Storage Enclosure (Personal Computers)
Based upon its specifications and price, this product seems like a great deal. And if you just need to share hard drives over your network without any security or passwords, it seem to work very well.
Here's why I'm returning mine.
1. Although the device is advertised as supporting the EXT3 file format (which is more secure than EXT2), D-link's original firmware apparently had many, many problems with EXT3, so Dlink updated the firmware. Did they re-write the firmware to correct the bugs? No. They just removed all support for EXT3. Unfortunately, they didn't re-write the manual, so if you read the manual, you'll wonder where the EXT3 options went, and whether your unit is defective or not.
If you don't know what EXT2 and EXT3 is, check out Wikipedia. Suffice it to say that EXT3 is better, more robust, and has better protection against data loss. Most NAS devices uses EXT3 by default. Although this device is advertised to support EXT3, it...Read more
