D-Link Forums
The Graveyard - Products No Longer Supported => D-Link Storage => DNS-323 => Topic started by: Banshee1971 on September 07, 2010, 09:19:01 PM
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It's not a bug, not a suggestion... just a good news about NAS.
A french website "Clubic" as tested and evaluate some NAS available on the market.
They said, at the end "if you want a storage NAS, we suggest you to look at DLINK".
http://www.clubic.com/article-151126-26-stockage-reseau-nas.html
Personnaly, i purchase Buffalo (5 years ago) and DLINK. The buffalo i suggest during that period to some of my customers having all the same problems : FAN STOP WORKING
The DLINK DNS-323 still working everywhere i suggest to purchase...
My futur purchase will be the DNS-343 ....probably in December or January !
I purchase my DNS-323 in december 2007 ... 3 years ago, and it's still working !
never lost anything since that time (i use seperate volume, and use SecondCopy to duplicate my file from Volume_1 to Volume_2.. a kind of RAID... with delay)
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I love my DNS-323. I have had it for a few years and it works great. I have all my data on the on the DNS-323, as in I run Windows 7 with my documents, pictures, and basically everything in my user profile on the DNS-323, only temp files and program files go on my C drive. And I have used the information on http://wiki.dns323.info/ to setup an cp with links/rysnc backup to the second drive each night (even if my computer is off). Which gives me a backup directory that can be read just like the original, but only taking up the space of what has changed, using a different directory each day. This gives me a "full" copy of all my data (and my wife's) for how it looked on any given day. I also have it send the changes to Amazon S3, using python/s3cmd/Perl, so I have a copy offline. And I have subversion running so that it makes a binary diff version of my Quicken file so that it doesn't consume 100 Meg for each backup. And when I bought it, I just thought I had bought a low cost low power NAS! I got a lot more. It isn't the fastest on the network, but frankly it doesn't need to be for me.
On the subject of RAID. RAID is very much overrated, what most people really need a back up instead. RAID (Mirroring) is only useful for people that need to keep running even if one hard drive fails. It does nothing for 99% of the problems people have with hard drives. If you make a mistake like delete a file/directory with RAID, it is gone from both disks, same for a bad program, corruption, you name it. I can live with the fact that I might lose up to one day worth of data, with the fact that I'm protected from all these problems and more (like the fact I can actually go back to any day, not just the last day) over just protecting from an hard drive failure. Which doesn't protect from a controller problem or from the tons of problems people run into with RAID and reconstructing after a failure.
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I have the Synology DS209. If you're looking for high performance, I'd be looking at something like that.
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I'm in the happy camp too. It's solid!
Here comes the flood of dissatisfied customers :) My DNS-323 is rubbish because (template answers below)...
I had a hard drive fail once
I didn't read the manual and couldn't get something working
I didn't read the product description and am now disapointed it doesn't make toast
It doesn't do what other products on the market do (e.g. make toast)
Some products twice the price seem to do more
D-Link hasn't tested every single hard drive on the market, and future ones that haven't been invented yet, to see if they work
I messed around with funplug and now I seem to have file access issues
It doesn't work on the network, I'm running 23 software firewalls, Norton and McAfee AV and nothing else works either
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Don't hold back Jamie, tell us what you really feel. :D
I have no problem with my D-Link NAS units, they do what they are supposed to, and I've had the DNS-323 for two plus years, never any issues that weren't of my own making. My only modification was to add front vents to the boxes since they have no decent airflow.
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I'm in the happy camp too. It's solid!
Here comes the flood of dissatisfied customers :) My DNS-323 is rubbish because (template answers below)...
I didn't know the DNS-323 has half of the transfer speed of other NASes.
I didn't even know that you should look at transfer speeds whan you buy a NAS.
I didn't even know what a NAS is. Just wanted to have files shared between computers. Now I want the share to be as fast as a normal internal HDD. :P
P.s. For the rest its quite a nice computer (to park stuff and download torrents). Last night I dreamed my PC and my DNS-323 were stolen so I lost all the data :P
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Ok, it's a good NAS - but I'm not sure it features in my dreams. :)
Maybe you should consider storing a backup off site, or online, if you are paranoid.
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I own a synology DS210+ and I can tell you the software on this device is hands down better than anything dlink can produce. I highily reccomend synology products now.
I am a former DNS323 user, I sold mine to a freind.
I get 62mb/s writes and 76mb/s reads with the DS210+. DS210+ claims to do slighlty over 100mb/s reads however my 5400rpm WD20EARS hard drives are the bottleneck.
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I own a synology DS210+ and I can tell you the software on this device is hands down better than anything dlink can produce. I highily reccomend synology products now.
DNS-323: £109.00
DS210+: £314.99
You fall in to the "Some products twice the price seem to do more" category. Except this one is three times the price.
I highly recommend Ferrari now, since it goes quicker than my Ford Fiesta.
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The good side of this thread is to let people know what differences are getting with the price shift.
:) At least now I will remember the 210+ very well.
P.s. The transfer rate on the DNS-323 drops dramatically when you are downloading torrents. We are talking a drop from ~21 Mb/s to 12 Mb/s. Since I always leave torrents on, it is like having forever only 12 Mb/s. What about the other NASes, do they have this transfer drop when using torrent downloads?
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What about the other NASes, do they have this transfer drop when using torrent downloads?
I believe the issue is really simultaneous access from more than one system/user rather than limited to anything to do with BT.
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Well, when you start with 60mbytes/sec, a small drop may not be too big a price to bear. :) OTOH, I've never tried torrents with my Synology DS209, so I can't really say.
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I believe the issue is really simultaneous access from more than one system/user rather than limited to anything to do with BT.
The matter is that transfer rates drop also when torrents are downloading on HDD1 and I am working on HDD2. The NAS is simply slow, no matter how you split the work on hard drives. So it should be a limit of the system handling badly the simultaneous access. E better system could overcome these issues. But how better?
I would be interested to know if somebody measured transfer rates with torrents on a Synology. Do you get so bad as half of the original value when you use the NAS for downloads?
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The matter is that transfer rates drop also when torrents are downloading on HDD1 and I am working on HDD2. The NAS is simply slow, no matter how you split the work on hard drives. So it should be a limit of the system handling badly the simultaneous access. E better system could overcome these issues. But how better?
I would be interested to know if somebody measured transfer rates with torrents on a Synology. Do you get so bad as half of the original value when you use the NAS for downloads?
Whenever you ask the questions like "why is this slow" or "how can I speed this up" you must first understand what is slowing something down. With the DNS-323 saying that my transfers are slow when I do XXX on HDD1 even when I work on HDD2 shows that you don't understand what the bottleneck is.
The bottleneck in the DNS-323 is clearly the performance of the CPU/Memory, and is that way because it is a low cost, low power device. As in it doesn't matter if your tires are rated for 300 miles per hour performance, if you are driving a ford fiesta (your hard drive are the tires). Besides the low power CPU the DNS-323 only has 64 Mega bytes of memory (due in part to "low cost"), if you are running a program(s) that uses too much memory it is going to have to constantly swap out to the hard drive and it will quickly get to the point it is spending more time doing that then useful work.
So could the Synology overcome these problems? I have no clue since I don't have one to study where its bottlenecks are, but personally if I was going to spend 3 times the money, and have the extra power requirements, I would just go to a low cost atom computer. It would cost about the same (maybe even less). I could run whatever OS I liked, with whatever programs I liked, and I wouldn't be locking to some hardware manufacturer's release cycle.
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hat the bottleneck is.
The bottleneck in the DNS-323 is clearly the performance of the CPU/Memory, and is that way because it is a low cost, low power device. ... Besides the low power CPU the DNS-323 only has 64 Mega bytes of memory (due in part to "low cost"), if you are running a program(s) that uses too much memory it is going to have to constantly swap out to the hard drive and it will quickly get to the point it is spending more time doing that then useful work.e manufacturer's release cycle.
I disagree with "clearly". Memory is not an issue and is only used for caching in this case. There should not be ANY swapping to disk on the NAS. I suspect the issue is the bus and/or disk I/O controller. The HDD's are an obvious other potential candidate. Cpu and memory are the least concerned.
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I disagree with "clearly". Memory is not an issue and is only used for caching in this case.
Memory is the issue.
Please read Bill Meade's article from 2007 http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/29936/79/1/4/ (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/29936/79/1/4/)
...it looks like the current state of the art in NAS performance follows the first 3 laws of finance: get the cache, get the cache, get the cache.
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We will have to disagree then. Memory as you described it is RAM, used for program loading. Cache memory is completely different.
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We will have to disagree then. Memory as you described it is RAM, used for program loading. Cache memory is completely different.
You don't have to disagree with me (I'm just a nobody). You have to disagree with Bill Meade
(who writes about NAS technology for a living). I think the article does a good job of describing RAM
and Cache use in a NAS, without any mention of program loading. And still comes to the conclusion...
The best place to put your money to optimize NAS performance is to beef up the RAM on a NAS and each networked client.
Perhaps your difference of opinion comes from you being in the "egg" camp (as Bill describes it) and Bill (and myself) are in the "chicken" camp.
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You don't have to disagree with me (I'm just a nobody). You have to disagree with Bill Meade
(who writes about NAS technology for a living). I think the article does a good job of describing RAM
and Cache use in a NAS, without any mention of program loading. And still comes to the conclusion...
Perhaps your difference of opinion comes from you being in the "egg" camp (as Bill describes it) and Bill (and myself) are in the "chicken" camp.
Since I started some of this with my "clearly" comment, I going to throw a few more things out. First I shouldn't have said "clearly", I should have said "clear to me", because clearly based on experience and other factors what is clear to one person isn't to the other. But let me now tell you why I believe what I believe.
First the idea that the drive is the problem. The drive when put in a high performance machine would easily support the operations in question without the performance hit described. Second the person describing the problem already stated that if the do BT on one drive and work off of the second drive it is still slow (as in a second drive and its ability to deliver data didn't fix the problem). The drive(s) are not the problem. You brought up the fact about it might be the drive controller. I say no way. If I ask the DNS-323 to copy files from one disk to another, I will see quite good performance, and it will be far above any performance that you see in any network traffic.
That brings us to the network. If say the network can perform at X Mbps with no load on the CPU, like just transferring data through it from data that is in memory then the network system in the DNS-323 can handle that much. That basically brings us down to the CPU/Memory/Bus. Well in the above test of memory to network test, the CPU, Memory, and Bus are all being used. So they can do at least that speed. Plus the disk to disk transfer, which has transfer speeds far exceeding the BT and working at the same time requirements for the Bus, says it is not the Bus transfer speed that is the bottleneck.
That leave me with the CPU and the Memory. Since I have never used BT I don't know its CPU requirements so I left it at CPU and/or Memory. But memory would be my first guess. Because BT is most likely just a transfer protocol and they tend to be I/O and/or memory bound. And the belief that it can't be memory seems really strange point of view to me since here is what that memory (Yes RAM, a disk is not memory unless you are talking about virtual memory) is used for. First off it is used to hold all the programs running and their data, this includes the OS, and its drivers and such. Second it is used to cache disk I/O, mine is typically consuming 10 Meg just for the cache, and the cache is dynamically changed as the need arises. Next, about those programs and memory. Different programs ask for different amounts of memory. Like I said I have no idea how much memory BT uses, but BT was certainly written for systems that have a lot more memory on them. And if someone is trying to keep track of files and data contents, and they are trying to make things faster they all count on going to the memory instead say doing something on the hard drive to speed things up. This works great until you run out of memory, and then the OS has no choice, but to swap things out to the hard drive, and it can quickly become a war of what swapping in and out. I use s3cmd (python) to transfer my backups to offline, and if I use the sync command on a directory with more then say 1000 files in it, it will run out of memory and go into swap hell, and the DNS-323 will have to be rebooted, so instead I use a Perl script to call s3cmd to transfer the require files one at a time. So it really does depend on how the memory is used, and if the programmer was aware of the fact that memory might be limited or not.
Back to the CPU. Short of BT doing some fancy computing, the operations are all about moving data around like from network to hard drive. As such this really shouldn't taxi the CPU much, and for my backups both locally and offline I don't see it really keeping the CPU that busy (as shown by top) so I would think it is the same with BT.
As people might have guessed by these statements I'm not casual user, as a matter of fact some might call me an expert. And you do learn a few things working in the computer field for 35 years with 30+ years of programming experience (started as a hardware guy, and switch to software).