Hey guys,
I just want to let you know that I pulled my 2 drives out of the NAS, installed them on my Ubuntu server and used mdadm to set up RAID0. I was able to see all the files still in the drive and transfer large files to / from Mac as well as Vista boxes.
I used both FileZilla (on Mac) and drag&drop to samba network file system (on vista) to do the test. The transfer rates varied between 52 MB/s (416 mbps) to 72 MB/s (576 mbps), at one point in time it was over 80 MB/s. Now THAT is the performance I would expect from a NAS.
Those hard drives are now back to their cage, the DNS-321, while I am searching for a new computer case for my server to house them. The funny thing was that I tried to transfer the same files using the DNS-321 as last test and I got 12 MB/s this time, as if the beast was begging me "Master, don't leave me, see I am good now I give you double of the 6MB/s bandwidth you had before". Too late, baby!
The sad part is that when I bought the gigabit switches I got the expected good performance out of those devices and I did not have to work so hard to find work-around solutions. However, when I bought this DNS-321 and saw the claim of gigabit port support, I would expect something reasonable fast, not the lame bandwidth of 6 - 12 MB/s (48 - 96 mbps) which is less than the Fast Ethernet rate.
I truly think Dlink should put some sort of sticky note to let people know that this is something they are working on (hopefully) instead of letting the users keep asking the same questions on the slow speed over and over. It's not cool.