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[loska]

Hi everyone,

I am thinking of buying a DNS-321 but have a couple of questions. Maybe the answer can be found in an FAQ or by searching but I have tried and could not find anything.

Firstly I have read in a few places about people refering to different hardware versions, in particular A2 and C1. From what I can gather C1 is the latest. Where can I find more info on this and how do you know what version you are getting when buying one?

Secondly I would like to run RAID 1 and was wondering if for some reason the unit fails (DNS-321) or a drive fails can I just whack the good drive into an external drive and pick up the data. This would obviously depend on if the OS of the system reading the attached drive can read EXT2. More my question is on the actual drive there is just the pure data and nothing proprietary to DLINK that I need an DNS-321 to read the data off it?

Thanks a lot for any responses.
Cheers.

[gunrunnerjohn]

I know of no easy way to see what hardware version you're getting, short of taking it out of the box and looking at the label.

If a drive fails in RAID-1, you can still read the other drive using the DNS-321.  If the NAS fails, you can read the drives using Linux or a Windows EXT2 driver package.

[ceilingstorage]

...If the NAS fails, you can read the drives using Linux or a Windows EXT2 driver package.

How confident are you of that?   Reason I ask is that when reading through some early posts a couple of days ago I got the impression that one could not take RAID-1 formatted drives from an external system and install on the 321 NAS or vice-versa take from 321 and read them on another system.   That there was some non-standard data structures used as part of the RAID which caused the problem.   But that a hard drive export/import could be done with standard, non-RAID formatted drives.  I can not find the exact post which said that, but did found a related post DNS-321 Format Raid 1 array member at http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=10956.0  which reports have problems reading 321 RAID-1 drive on a ubuntu system.

[gunrunnerjohn]

Well, I'm not 100% confident, since I haven't done it.  I'd wait for more responses before I counted on it.

[loska]

Thanks very much for the replies.

I am assuming the product code for a DNS-321 with HW Version A1 will end in A1. And likewise C2 will end in C2. I know this is a bit of a stupid question but can anyone who actually owns a DNS-321 confirm this.

Understood about the doubt in taking the drive formatted with RAID 1 and reading via external drive. Anyone actually done this?

[palswim]

Understood about the doubt in taking the drive formatted with RAID 1 and reading via external drive. Anyone actually done this?

You can't take an EXT2/EXT3 drive and insert it into the DNS-321 and have it work, but you can do the reverse.  The NAS partitions your drives a bit strangely (four partitions, the first a linux swap, but I'm not sure what it does with the others), but the partition with most of your disk space is just a normal EXT2/EXT3 partition.

[JoeSchmuck]

You can read and Ext2 or Ext3 RAID1 drive via Knopix bootable CD.  I did it on an Ext3 disk many many months ago.  It's burried in this forum somewhere with step by step instructions.

I too was conserned about data recovery but now I'm not.

-Joe