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[zvile8or]

My apologies if these questions have been asked previously or in separate posts. I hunted around the forums as well as some Google searches with mixed results.

I am strongly considering purchasing the DNS-321 but had a few questions/concerns.

Has anyone had any luck in using the 321 with a pair of 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Drives (ST31500341AS)? I have a pair (I couldn't pass up the $86 price on Dell) that I would like to set up as a redundant NAS.

I have read lots of concerns and/or frustrations with some of the more advanced (and perhaps not so advanced) features. For my purposes I was planning only on running them in Standard mode, and then use software to have the secondary drive mirror the primary. Aside from possible compatibility issues with the hard drives, is there any reason to second guess this implementation? For me it meets my needs of an inexpensive, reliable, fully redundant, always on/accessible from the network configuration.

Thank you in advance for your time.

[fordem]

Please - you need to research and understand the terms you are using

What you are suggesting is neither mirroring nor fully redundant.

With mirrored drives there is no primary drive and no secondary drive - whatever is written to the first drive is also written to the second drive, almost simultaneously - delete a file, whether accidentally or deliberately, it's gone from both drives - if it's not backed up elsewhere - consider it gone forever.

What you describe as mirrored is "synchronisation", and if you configure the software to do it automatically at timed intervals, it becomes "scheduled synchronisation", and can be considered as a form of backup, but you need to be aware that a file modified or deleted on the primary drive, will have those changes synchronised at the next scheduled interval, so depending on the interval chosen, there could still be data loss.

Mirrored drives are considered redundant, synchronised drives are not.

With mirrored drives, if a drive fails, the system continues to run, with the data remaining available with no human intervention.  Depending on the system design, some sort of alert should be sent to the administrator, users may never be aware of the failure.

With synchonised drives, a drive failure may (if it is the primary which fails) cause the data to be unavailable until the administrator either remaps the secondary to takes it's place, or replaces it and restores the data from the secondary - in this scenario, all data written to the primary since the last sync event will be lost.  If it is the secondary that fails, there will usually be no disruption or data loss.

Mirroring serves a specific purpose - that of eliminating or minimizing the down time caused by a disk failure - a backup is still required to prevent data loss due to any other cause, synchonisation serves a different purpose, eliminating or minimizing data loss, with no regard for down time - synchronisation to another device can be used to backup mirrored disks.

[r!ng0]

I'm running 321 with 2 1.5TB Segates, mirrored. Works fine. It's far from being perfect, but for simple networked data storage without fancy features works. Drops a ball here and there, but is an OK bang for buck.