Gigabit Network Attached Storage
Mar 6th, 2008 by Dave
After reviewing many of the options out there for Network Attached Storage (NAS), basically a device that hooks one or more hard drives up to your network without requiring a dedicated computer, I settled on the Dlink DNS-323 which cost me about $190 (not including the drives).
Basically I was looking to replace a somewhat haphazard file archiving system for source code and photos where I kept copies of everything on separate machines so that if one drive was corrupted I could go to the other machine. This solution allows for RAID 0 (striped) or RAID 1 (mirrored) with 2 drives; or you can just put 2 disks and run them in JBOD mode (”Just a Bunch of Disks”). My photography, where I’m shooting in RAW at 15-16MB per file eats up disk space quickly. I’m running it in a RAID 1 configuration; if I get another unit for the network I’ll run it in JBOD mode for the capacity.
There are other solutions out there; some of the drawbacks of other systems were that they were sealed units, so basically if a drive goes bad you have to send the whole unit back to the manufacturer to recover the data. Other units were slow; they connect at 10/100 Mbps; not the Gigabit speed the DNS-323 offered. I got a pair of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives for the NAS enclosure and they are working out pretty well; you just slide them into place and then put the cover on, no cabling required. You can get access to the Linux capabilities of the NAS with some simple hacks (search on “fun plug”). There is a USB printer connector; however that didn’t work for my old Lexmark InkJet printer / scanner / fax so that remains unused. There are a lot of admin options on the page for the device; one set of pages for configuration allows for scheduled FTP downloads; I scheduled a series of website backups which worked fine when I manually triggered the backups but didn’t work on their own. Data transfer over the Gigabit network with the fast drives (7200 RPM, 3 Gps) is pretty speedy, but with the power save feature there is a spin up time if you haven’t used the drives in a while.
Overall I’m happy with the purchase.