1. Provide the capability to convert from single drive operation to RAID 1 mirror without backing everything up, formatting both drives, and writing it all back out again. When the user inserts a second disk, the firmware should allow the user to
2. Provide ability to "grow" mirrors by installing larger drives one at a time. For example, say that I have a pair of 320GB drives. I should be able to replace one with a 1GB drive and rebuild the mirror. Then I should be able to replace the remaining 320GB drive with a second 1GB drive and, again, rebuild the mirror. At that point, the DNS-321 should automatically increase the partition size to use the full disks. So I swap one out in the morning, swap the second one out when I get home from work, and then the next day I have a larger array.
3. Add ability to support passive mode FTP. This would require that the unit "know" what the public IP address was (if the router was port-forwarding) and that the PASV port range be able to be specified by the user.
4. Add a mail server. Now you have a complete presence for a small business: Web site, FTP site, and e-mail.
5. Add jumbo frame test. If someone selects jumbo frames, the DNS-321 should initiate a test to ascertain whether it can still communicate with the host system and also to help the user select the best jumbo frame size based on throughput. No communications should result in jumbo frames being automatically turned back off.
6. Ability to "daisy-chain" to achieve RAID 5. Imagine two DNS-321s with one taking the master role and the other the slave. The master would do a RAID 0 stripe across two drives while the slave would XOR each sector and write it to its internal drives. If any one of the two master drives went down, the secondary unit could provide the data necessary to reconstruct the missing drive's data until the drive was replaced. Would it be slower? Sure, but the user could buy three 1TB drives and get 2TB of RAID 5 space. And D-Link would sell more DNS-321 units.
P.S. I'll cast my vote against trying to support a bunch of different codecs for AV. Space is limited, both RAM and flash, and there are more useful features associated with NAS that should be implemented first. I am the moderator for the Exact Audio Copy forum on Yahoo! and I've seen too many issues related to codecs to think that it's a good idea to put a bunch of them into a small, inexpensive, slow NAS box.
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Topic: Future Firmware Request Forum (Read 12544 times)