Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Absu]

I am curious about the stability and performance with the DNS-323 during heavy, continuous use.

I'm currently running a PC with XP as a fileserver. It's running two 1TB Seagate drives in a RAID1. It serves my main machine and other computers throughout my house. There are issues with the OS hard drive and I'm convinced the SATA controller the on the motherboard itself is starting to go, so I'm looking to replace it relatively soon.

Instead of replacing the OS hard drive and the motherboard I would like to use a DNS-323; it would be far less work to configure, one less image to maintain, etc. I am already running one for my media with two 1.5TB Seagate drives in RAID1, but its usage would be far less than this new one I would like to put up.

I run everything across the network from the file server. Pretty much anything that can be stored off my main machine is on there. Pictures, videos, music, documents, computer images, virtual machines, etc. And I open/edit them all across the network. I would be using the same two 1TB drives in the D-LINK and I would be running in a RAID1.

I am curious what the performance would be like versus the PC, and how stable it would be. I've heard of issues where the RAID will degrade randomly. I can't afford to have my array continually rebuilt or my data compromised. I of course have my most critical stuff backed up to an external drive, but I would rather avoid the hassle and downtime.

Are there any recommendations or suggestions? Should I just stick to my current setup and replace my hardware, or would it be better if I moved to a DNS-323? Any advice would be appreciated, thank you.

[rkaye]

i think many of us here have multiple dns-323 units installed doing exactly what you are setting out to do.  I have one unit as backup, one as applications, and one as multimedia. backup gets used once a week, media quite often,... The "speed" of the dns-323 will be exactly the same as your pc or any other device on your network -- or to be more precise, is limited by the network bandwidth and the raid you are running:

• on wireless or 10/100mbps networks, the speed will be the same regardless of raid or noraid
• on gigabit-speed networks, raid1 devices will be about ¹/₃rd faster than a 100mbps network -- with raid0 (or raid5/6/10) devices, you will see a 3x speed increase over a 100mbps network

i (and suggest you do too) use seagate's seatools-dos [free download, nondestructive, bootable cd] to check your drives before you put them into your dns-323. i label mine with the date they pass the 'Long DST' (Drive Standard Test) and schedule them to be retested every 12mos. I do this when I buy a new drive as well -- before ever putting data on them.

the only headache I see with your move from a xp-pc server to the dns-323, is that you are going to need to shuffle data around (copy files off the xp-pc raid to somewhere) since those drives will need to be reformatted to ext2 to work in the dns-323.