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The Graveyard - Products No Longer Supported => D-Link Storage => DNS-323 => Topic started by: BKozan on January 13, 2015, 02:11:20 AM

Title: Easy Success with Seagate 2TB Drives FW 1.08
Post by: BKozan on January 13, 2015, 02:11:20 AM
I did a lot of searching and reading before attempting to install 2TB drives in my aging DNS-323 RevB. I thought I'd be a good samaritan and add this information to the interweb archives for future searchers.

My DNS-323 Rev B has been running 1.07 for years with some WD Caviar Green 750GB drives. The drives annoyed the **** out of me, going into some power saving head-park **** and killing any DLNA streaming I was doing. Today I:


Here's the details:
Download Firmware from here: ftp://ftp.dlink.eu/Products/dns/dns-323/archive/driver_software/  (http://ftp://ftp.dlink.eu/Products/dns/dns-323/archive/driver_software/)
The Drives: Seagate 2TB Barracuda ST2000DM001 3.5 Inch
(http://i.imgur.com/6NWFghxl.jpg)

Good luck!
Title: Re: Easy Success with Seagate 2TB Drives FW 1.08
Post by: JavaLawyer on January 13, 2015, 05:21:00 AM
Thank you for the info.  Owners of this legacy NAS are always looking for compatible HDDs.

How are you HDDs configured (RAID-1, RAID-0, JBOD, Standard Configuration...)?
How long has your DNS-323 been running since you completed the data migration?
Title: Re: Easy Success with Seagate 2TB Drives FW 1.08
Post by: Steve Pitts on January 17, 2015, 01:09:15 PM
Quote from: BKozan on January 13, 2015, 02:11:20 AM
Downloaded firmware 1.08B09 from UK FTP site
Did you deliberately choose not to go with the latest firmware that handles 4K alignment?? For your sake I hope that Seagate's SmartAlign technology has mitigated the issue with alignment that originally existed with the AFT drives.
Title: Re: Easy Success with Seagate 2TB Drives FW 1.08
Post by: TomekP on February 07, 2015, 01:56:21 PM
Based partly on this post and other searches I also decided to upgrade my DNS-323 (A1) to two of these 2TB ST2000DM001 drives. I thought it was slightly risky (I could not find any 2TB drives currently on the market guaranteed to work), but knew I had other uses for these drives if they proved not to work.

My findings so far:

The guidance about using 4K drives in the DNS-323 says they will fail to format unless on the 1.10 firmware, so I duly upgraded from 1.09 and formatted them as two individual disks (no RAID) in EXT2 mode.
Both formatted fine, but the immediate issue I had was transfer speed. Neither disk would copy files any faster than 2MB/s and they would frequently "stutter" or "stall" where the speed would drop to 0 for up to around 20 seconds.
So I downgraded to 1.09 and tried formatting again. Once again the formatter appeared to complete OK (it took a long time), but I had exactly the same issues with transfer speeds.

Finally I tried the Alt-F firmware (EXT4 mode) and immediately transfer speeds were back up to 10MB/s (the max speed for my 10/100 network). With great relief I now have a 4TB DNS-323 that so far seems completely stable...

The differences between BKozan's experience and mine is the use of the 1.08 firmware (which - like 1.09 - in theory shouldn't work); the use of RAID EXT3 (would this matter?); and the revision B1 of the device (perhaps this is key?).