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[yuppicide]

I had a Western Digital TV Live Hub.. it's a media player with a 1TB hard drive built in. It died on me. I was able to remove the drive and get my data, though.

I need some sort of NAS to protect my data. At work we're looking at a unit from Synology, but I saw it only uses SATAII. I thought maybe I'd look at the DNS-345. I'm very very happy with my DIR-825 router from D-Link and I figure products in the same family work better.

So, I see the drive compatibility list.. are there certain drive revisions that are needed? Reading up on Synology's website theirs lists "notes" next to each drive. Sounds like they do support drives, but only certain revisions. How crappy is that to have to look that hard for a drive.

I do not want to run a backup.. can I just drag and drop files to the unit or no? I've never owned a NAS before. What kind of RAID setup should I be using? RAID 5? I will be putting 4 drives in it right from the start. Probably those WD Red 2TB.

How is the app you can get for an Android phone for example? I don't really need to access my stuff elsewhere, but then I thought wouldn't be bad to listen to some of my music on lunch at work or watch some of my television shows.

[yuppicide]

OH! I had one more question I didn't see on the product web page. Does it have a processor and RAM? Can the RAM be upgraded?

Just wondering because the Synology unit lists a processor and RAM.

Also, how easy is it to get drives in and out when one goes bad? How does it warn you a drive is/has failed? I assume this not a hot swappable device.

[JavaLawyer]

So, I see the drive compatibility list.. are there certain drive revisions that are needed? Reading up on Synology's website theirs lists "notes" next to each drive. Sounds like they do support drives, but only certain revisions. How ****py is that to have to look that hard for a drive.

The HDDs on the DNS-345 - Compatible HDDs list were validated by D-Link. D-Link has never specified required hardware revisions. I'm guessing that Synology only tested specific revisions, so that's all they're willing to hang there hat on, although I would presume that other revisions of the same line would also work.

. . .Can I just drag and drop files to the unit or no? I've never owned a NAS before.

You can open the DNS-343 from your PC and it will open like any other folder on "My Computer". From there, you can drag/drop files to/from the volume just as you would any folder on Windows.

I do not want to run a backup. . . What kind of RAID setup should I be using? RAID 5? I will be putting 4 drives in it right from the start. Probably those WD Red 2TB.

If your data is important to you, you should maintain a backup. RAID provides redundancy, but is NOT a backup. Please carefully read the following thread: DNS-345 - Data Backup Versus Redundancy. This advice applies to all brands of NAS.

How is the app you can get for an Android phone for example? I don't really need to access my stuff elsewhere, but then I thought wouldn't be bad to listen to some of my music on lunch at work or watch some of my television shows.

I haven't personally tested the mobile device cloud app yet.

[JavaLawyer]

OH! I had one more question I didn't see on the product web page. Does it have a processor and RAM? Can the RAM be upgraded?

Yes, the DNS-345 has a CPU and RAM. The DNS-345 is essentially a computer in and of itself, running a Linux kernel. The DNS-345 has a 1.6 GHz CPU. I don't know the RAM size off the top of my head, although that shouldn't be a prevailing factor impacting performance. I don't believe the RAM is upgradable, but again, I don't think the RAM will be a bottleneck for performance.

Also, how easy is it to get drives in and out when one goes bad? How does it warn you a drive is/has failed? I assume this not a hot swappable device.

Removing a HDD involves powering down the DNS-345, pulling off the front-face of the unit, and sliding out the HDD. The process should not take more than 30 seconds. The DNS-345 is not hot-swappable, i.e. the unit must be powered down to remove HDDs.

The DNS-345 web UI displays the health of each hard drive in the unit.

[yuppicide]

Thanks. I think you answered all my questions. I understand this is not a "backup" such as Blu-Ray, but that would take a lot to do. Too many discs. We've used tape drives at work, and they're supposedly reliable, but I am nervous. They've failed for us NUMEROUS times. We had two drives go bad, and too many tapes to count. I do clean it on a regular basis.

[JavaLawyer]

There's an alternative that you may want to consider that will depend on how much data you'll be storing.
If you add four 3TB HDDs configured as Standard Volumes, you can use the HDDs in Slot-1 and Slot-2 for your source data and schedule backups to Slot-3 and Slot-4

Slot-1  -- Scheduled Backup --> Slot-3
Slot-2  -- Scheduled Backup --> Slot-4


This approach works so long as two slots will be adequate for your data storage needs in the foreseeable future.

[an3k]

The DNS-345 is fine for private usage but it lacks of some important features for semi-professional users.

a) No SATA III
b) No upgradable RAM
c) No USB3.0
d) Only FAT16/32, NFTS for external HDDs

You can use new 4K blocksize SATAIII HDDs (for example i use four Seagate ST2000DM001 in RAID10) but regardless of the HDDs you use, you never get more than ~35MB/s in average for reading from/writing to the NAS.

If one user writes one big file (eg. 1 GB) to the NAS it's processor is already at 100% usage. This causes the speed to drop down to ~35MB/s. If now another user wants to read files from the NAS both users get much lower speeds.

If you want more speed and the ability to upgrade RAM you should check QNAP products, eg. the TS-459 Pro II. It has SATA III, iSCSI and much more features. However, it costs more than twice than the D-Link DNS-345.

[JavaLawyer]

The DNS-345 is fine for private usage but it lacks of some important features for semi-professional users.t regardless of the HDDs you use, you never get more than ~35MB/s in average for reading from/writing to the NAS.

If one user writes one big file (eg. 1 GB) to the NAS it's processor is already at 100% usage. This causes the speed to drop down to ~35MB/s. If now another user wants to read files from the NAS both users get much lower speeds.

The ~35 MB/s cap is indicative of all ShareCenter models I've seen or used.  My two DNS-343s (DNS-345 predecessor) maxes out at ~32-34 MB/s.