HoustonFirefox
Active Member
This is a copy of my review of this product on Amazon.com
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I had a devil of a time locating a supplier for the D-Link DNS-323 NAS! D-Link was reporting out-of-stock for awhile and one morning, at 6:30am I found it available from D-Link. Apparently the demand is so high that they sell out within a day of the shipment coming in. Anyways...
I ordered the DNS-323 to allow me to store my DVDs for streaming to my HTPC in the living room. Setup was very simple but beware that using Firefox for a browser with this device will get you nowhere until after formatting. Also, although not mentioned in the very scant documentation, you will need to power-off the device after formatting a drive and re-power it for you to get anything on your browser-based setup. Otherwise everytime you browse to the device the only option it will give you is to "format drive".
Although it has a gigabit ethernet port, I am using it on a 100mpbs network and find it to be incredibly fast. I usually don't like D-Link products because I find they tend to fail after awhile of being on, but in this case the DNS-323 appears well-built and is very easy to use for my purposes.
i am running two Western Digital 500gb drives with firmware 1.01B in standard mode and had no problem at all getting it to recognise the drives.
Although I haven't tested it, the USB port only allows support for a USB printer but since the internal operating system is based on Linux, I expect this to change very soon to support an external USB hard drive or other USB devices.
Again, for my purposes I use it to store backup copies of my DVDs for streaming to my HTPC and it works fantastic for that. I especially like the configurable power-down timer for the hard drives. I have mine set for 30 minutes and, if nothing is being read or written to the drives in that time, it powers down the hard drives to save energy and wear (who watches DVDs 24/7 anyway?).
I have not used the advanced features yet (Ftp, Backup, etc) but would imagine that it would work well in that regard. Availability is sporadic as everyone seems to want a NAS with these features. I'm just surprised it took so long for a company to come up with the idea of using SATA drives in a NAS for a reasonable price!
Happy in Houston.
* * * * *
I had a devil of a time locating a supplier for the D-Link DNS-323 NAS! D-Link was reporting out-of-stock for awhile and one morning, at 6:30am I found it available from D-Link. Apparently the demand is so high that they sell out within a day of the shipment coming in. Anyways...
I ordered the DNS-323 to allow me to store my DVDs for streaming to my HTPC in the living room. Setup was very simple but beware that using Firefox for a browser with this device will get you nowhere until after formatting. Also, although not mentioned in the very scant documentation, you will need to power-off the device after formatting a drive and re-power it for you to get anything on your browser-based setup. Otherwise everytime you browse to the device the only option it will give you is to "format drive".
Although it has a gigabit ethernet port, I am using it on a 100mpbs network and find it to be incredibly fast. I usually don't like D-Link products because I find they tend to fail after awhile of being on, but in this case the DNS-323 appears well-built and is very easy to use for my purposes.
i am running two Western Digital 500gb drives with firmware 1.01B in standard mode and had no problem at all getting it to recognise the drives.
Although I haven't tested it, the USB port only allows support for a USB printer but since the internal operating system is based on Linux, I expect this to change very soon to support an external USB hard drive or other USB devices.
Again, for my purposes I use it to store backup copies of my DVDs for streaming to my HTPC and it works fantastic for that. I especially like the configurable power-down timer for the hard drives. I have mine set for 30 minutes and, if nothing is being read or written to the drives in that time, it powers down the hard drives to save energy and wear (who watches DVDs 24/7 anyway?).
I have not used the advanced features yet (Ftp, Backup, etc) but would imagine that it would work well in that regard. Availability is sporadic as everyone seems to want a NAS with these features. I'm just surprised it took so long for a company to come up with the idea of using SATA drives in a NAS for a reasonable price!
Happy in Houston.