Okay, I do not have an available PC with SATA (yeah.. I know.. I need a new PC), so I can't plug my drives in and run a scan utility on them easily. However, here's my experience thus far:
2 brand new Samsung Spinpoint 1.5TB drives installed, set up in DNS-323 as RAID1
after about 2 days, my RAID1 appeared degraded, and my DNS-323 says the "right" drive failed. there was a pink colored light. I ran a rebuild, things seemed to work again for a day or two - then the same thing happened. "Right" drive failed.
Since I can't test, and for the sake of curiosity, I decided to power down the DNS-323 and switch the drives - knowing I may have to reformat, etc. I powered it down, switched the 2 drives to opposite slots. Why did I do this? To see if this time the DNS-323 might say my "left" drive failed... I also figured that maybe my hard drives are not ideal for RAID1 synchronization, so I thought what the heck, i'll just do a standard, 2 volume reformat.
2 days later, BOTH lights are pink, and the web interface on my DNS-323 seems to "hang" once I log in and load the status page. The CSS (yes, cascading style sheet) doesn't download, so it's all unstyled, and the output stops before listing the drives... Any attempt to load a DNS-323 page after that fails with a network error.
So... now I've taken the drives out and reformatted them AGAIN... standard... no RAID.. no JBOD... 2 volumes... I can't imagine there's any more "stable" way to do this...
I highly doubt both of my drives were defective... I will take them to a friend's place and mount them in a SATA-supporting machine to run scan tools on each of them, but that's extremely inconvenient for me (and my friend) at the moment and won't happen right away...
In the meantime - I'd love to know if any others have Samsung 1.5tb HD154UI drives working on a DNS-323...