NAS is finally getting cheap enough to fit the budget of big budget home owners and SOHO and SMB’s. With cameras, video recorders, movies and music all going digital, users now have huge amounts of data they want to protect optimally. With increased hard drive space being available at lower costs, redundant backup is slowly moving from server rooms to homes and small offices. Although NAS cannot handle the block level access like SQL databases need (For which a better option is DAS or SAN) it still makes sense as it is cheaper, reliable, easy to configure and less power hungry than using a server or Desktop computer as a file server for backups. It also has a smaller footprint and lower power consumption than a PC or server acting as a redundant file server. The Dlink DNS 323 has the footprint of an APC 600VA UPS and so does not take up much space on the desktop.
The Boxed DNS-323 and two 1TB hard disks (bought separately)
Last week I got an opportunity to source and setup a D-link DNS-323 NAS box. We sourced the box for around INR 9800/- and had the option to go in for 2 SATA disks of either 1TB or 2TB. The 2TB x 2 option would have cost us an extra INR 12000/- and the 1TB x 2 option about INR 6000/- extra. Both the prices were quite good taking into consideration all the advantages of the DNS-323. We bought the box for individual user data backups, so redundancy was important to us, so we configured the box in RAID1 (mirroring mode). The DNS-323 claims that when a faulty disk is replaced, it will automatically rebuild the array.
The DNS-323 supports the following disk (SATA only) configurations. (Assumption is that we are using 2 x 2TB disks)
JBOD (Linear) mode which will give us a disk of the total size of both disks (disk a + disk b) = 4TB Volume
RAID 0 Gives us a high performance 4TB volume
RAID 1 Gives us a 2TB redundant volume
JBOD and RAID 0 both offer no redundancy, so it makes sense to go in for RAID 0 as it offers better performance while giving you the same total volume size -unless your disks are of dissimilar size as the formula for calculating the array size for RAID 0 is 2 x (size of the smallest disk). The other advantage that JBOD has is that in case of a crash, data
recovery would be relatively easier and cheaper.
The network interface on the DNS-323 is 10/100/1000 Gigabit ethernet. It also has a USB port which can be connected to a printer and allow it to act as a print server. It runs a flavor of Linux which supports both the ext2 and ext3 file systems. It helpfully advises you when configuring your disks that choosing ext2 will give you faster access times, while ext3 while slower, will store your data more reliably. It does not support ext4. It has a long list of protocols it supports, a few of which I am listing here.
Adding a disk drive to the NAS box is as easy as pushing it in
USB 2 Print Server, UPnP AV Media server for streaming to music, photos, and video to compatible media players, playstation 3 and Xbox 360, iTunes server, FTP Server etc..
Some of the software provided are, Dlink Easy Search, Drive clone pro etc.. This software enables manual backup and automatic backup as well. To be fair, I cannot comment on any of them as I’m a bit wary of bundled software. Many a time in the past, updates have not been provided and I don’t want to be shocked in the future when the next release of Windows comes by and the software proves truant or asks me to purchase a paid upgrade.
Close up of one of the drive bays.
Installing the hard disks was shockingly simple. The front of the box slides upwards and out like the battery cover on my Nokia 6275i. The hard disks are slid in and lock in place. They can be released by quick release levers behind the box. Put the cover back, connect it to a UPS and power it on and it starts to format the drives by itself. Of course once you configure the hard disks from the web interface, it formats the array again. In addition to the blue illuminated square that also functions as the power switch, there are 3 blue indicators on the bottom row. The center one shows network activity and the left and right one shows the state of the hard disks. The manual says that if a hard disk fails, the appropriate light will turn orange.
I did use the Dlink Easy search software as no matter what I did I could not locate the DNS-323 on the network. It was set to DHCP! Configuring the DNS-323 through its web interface was a breeze. I was able to create users and groups and assign different rights to either users and groups. I was able to turn on quotas for the users too. I setup a ftp server (supports sftp too) to receive the backups as SMB has too many protocol overheads. The reason I chose ftp over sftp was because the backups would take place over a private network and also because the freeware version of the backup software I was using would not support sftp.
Easy Web based administration
The DNS-323 supports a maximum of 10 simultaneous ftp connections. To be on the safe side, I staggered the backups and scheduled the backups to take place at half hour intervals on each client. I was happy with the speed at which the DNS-323 responded. The DNS-323 was located in my office, was switched to another office with a STP cable close to 100 meters in length, switched again and sent to a floor below, finally switched twice before it terminated at a 108MBPS access point. Not a very good way to setup a network, but our offices grew that way and some of them are temporary.
The best part is that I was able to setup the DNS-323 to email me the daily system and access log files and also a report detailing the amount of disk space used and free space remaining. The backups are going great! I’ll be shortly documenting the client side of the backup solution.
The NAS Box installed between a Netgear Access point and APC RS 600 UPS
The D-link DNS-323 is a great buy! Buying one for my home and connecting it to a wireless access point in client mode, I would have something better than Apple’s Time capsule!
-infinite control over what I could do with it, multi operating system compatibility, RAID, and of course no limitations enforced upon me by by Apple 
Note: (20th April 2011)
We bought a new NAS box for our office for our accounts backup. The hard disks that we got this time were slim hard disks. This is when I noted that they were incredibly difficult to insert as they would not align with the SATA connectors on the rear as the bays were sized for thicker hard disks. Even after fitting, these hard disks keep wobbling around and might damaged the connectors if the box receives as sharp jolt. Dlink needs to work on bays that will fit both sizes of hard disks optimally.
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