D-Link Dns-320 Sharecenter

[threegee]

Time in use: Over six months.

Current Configuration: 2 Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB SATA 5400RPM Hard Drives.

Price: About £64 plus about £55 each for drives - all from Amazon on free delivery.

Description: The DNS-320 is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box. Mine came with the original Version 1 firmware, but the upgrade to the latest version was painless. So painless that I've forgotten how long it took - but it was of the order of 15 minutes. The latest firmware completely transforms the feel of the thing and reportedly fixes a few bugs. The box also has an auxiliary USB port under a flap on the front, and this seems to do the job of networking that odd USB hard drive quite well. I don't think this USB will network a printer though (don't need to so never tried it), but I could be wrong here. The unit supports stand-alone bit torrenting, FTP, and has a scheduler for automatic transfers, etc. etc., though I've not had occasion to try any of the bells and whistles yet.

In Use: Initially I bought the box with only one 2TB drive. This was because I didn't want to invest in RAID until I decided the NAS was going to be of some use. Also I didn't want to buy two drives from the same manufacturing batch to use in a RAID setup. Consequently I waited well over three months before ordering up the second Samsung Spinpoint F4. When it arrived I slipped the top cover off - the whole thing is utterly screw-less, and the drives are simply held in place by gravity - and dropped the new drive into the second slot power on! The little blue LEDs seemed to be doing something so I refitted the top and walked away. A day or two later I slipped the top off and hot-pulled the original drive. It was very satisfying to find all the NAS data still fully accessible, and I popped the original drive back in again. Not wishing to push my luck on live data this is as far as the experimentation has gone, though I'm sufficiently confident in the set-up to not feel too compelled to keep keep further backups of the data. Logically I should probably blow another £55 and use it to swap with the mirror drive every so often, and store the third drive remotely - yes, will get around to this real soon!

Verdict: Excellent value for money, particularly when you consider you are buying a complete (ARM CPU based) networking computer here. The whole thing is a bit plasticy - unlike the more expensive Netgear NAS I was considering last year - but it's easily solid enough. Transfer speeds measured from my laptop using a cheapo 1Gbit/s network switch are of the order of 20-24MB/s second (bytes/sec not bits/sec folks!), which is plenty fast enough for multiple HD video streams or full computer backups. The only improvement I'd like to see is a hard on/off switch so that the box powers up itself after a power outage; you need to press the power button after a power glitch, and if the unit is sited remotely, as mine is, you have to go seek it out to press the power key. Would instantly buy another one, and may well do so when the 2TB of RAID space on this one starts to run out. Recommended!