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[neil.wilson]

Hi all,

I Just acquired a DNS-343.
Initially it had firmware 1.04.
Not knowing about AFT compatibility I tried setting up a RAID5 with 4 x 1TB drives:

2 x older samsung 103SJ 1TB 7200RPM (512 byte sectors)
2 x new seagate 1TB barracudas (AFT's with 4k sectors)

This worked ok for around 1 day(although write speed was awful) before going degraded on one of the seagate drives. I rebooted the unit and it then redetected the drive and attempted to syncronise, syncronisation failed and it went degraded again with the same disk missing.

After having a good read around in the forums, I updated the firmware to the latest 1.06 and reset to factory defaults, then recreated the RAID5 array with the same drives.

Does anyone have any positive experiences of mixing AFT drives with non AFT drives on the DNS-343 post firmware 1.05? Or should I expect it to fail again?

Would it work better if I did a 2TB RAID1 array with the 4 drives , or would I have AFT issues again?

Thanks
Neil.

[JavaLawyer]

If you formatted/configured the AFT HDDs with Firmware v1.04X or earlier, then the older non-AFT firmware is a likely cause for your issues. As a matter of following best practices, it's always ideal to use the same make/model HDD for a RAID configuration. That said, other than stating AFT HDD compatibility, D-Link has been silent as to how the DNS-343 behaves when mixing/matching AFT and non-AFT HDDs in the same array. This is not to say that such a configuration won't be stable. My concern is understanding how the DNS-343 collectively manages the different sector sizes and addressing for the AFT and non-AFT HDDs in the array.

Not having personally performed burn-in testing with a mix of AFT/non-AFT HDDs in RAID-5 configuration, you'll need to get the weigh-in from other DNS-343 owners who have a similar setup.

[neil.wilson]

Update , downgraded firmware back to 1.05 as it wouldnt let me change the hostname...the rest seemed fine with that firmware release though.

I had a dig around on the net and eventually found some cheap samsung hd103sj drives - although when they arrived they were labelled seagate samsung ... pesky seagate buying out samsungs hdd arm grrr...

Anyway as those drives seem to be thin on the ground these days I created a 3 drive RAID5 and kept 1 drive back as a hot spare.  The array has now been stable for a few days and isn't displaying any odd behavior thus far.

Tried writing to the array through windows shares and only got around 8-10 MB/s transfer speed which is a bit rubbish over a gigabit network , so I guess its the CPU or RAID5 in the NAS box causing the speed limitation.

Writing my stuff to it now via FTP , seem to get up to 15MB/s doing it that way.

Anyone know of any methods to boost the write speeds?

Thanks
Neil.

[JavaLawyer]

The best speeds I've been able to achieve with my DNS-343s with HDDs in a Standard Configuration on a GB network are 8-10 MB/s upload (PC > DNS-343) and ~32-34 MB/s download (DNS-343 > PC). As you surmised, writing and reading to/from a RAID-5 array will add additional overhead which will further impact performance.