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[Banshee1971]

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)

[chriso]

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.

[gunrunnerjohn]

I have the Synology DS209.  If you're looking for high performance, I'd be looking at something like that.

[jamieburchell]

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

[gunrunnerjohn]

Don't  hold back Jamie, tell us what you really feel.

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.

[irotjaf]

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.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

[jamieburchell]

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.

[Tank_Killer]

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.

[jamieburchell]

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.

[irotjaf]

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?

[dosborne]

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.

[gunrunnerjohn]

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.

[irotjaf]

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?

[chriso]

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.

[dosborne]

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.