Today UPS brought me the D-Link DNS-323 and 500 gig hard drive I ordered from Newegg.com. The D-Link DNS-323 is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) enclosure. So what is Network Attached Storage (NAS) anyway? Basically a NAS enclosure has all the software and hardware to make any hard drives or set of hard drives you install in the enclosure accessible on your network.
Most NAS devices targeted at the home networking market also include things like media servers and iTunes servers already installed on them. Which allows the devices to stream media files directly to a device with out needing to go through a computer. As an example you could store all your music files on the NAS and then use a laptop to stream the music to any room in you house. Depending on what servers the NAS device has installed on it you can stream right to the NAS to a network media player like Slim Devices Squeeze Box.
So why do I need a NAS? Well if you recall I have been backing up all the DVD’s I own and in the process filling up every hard drive I can get my hands on. Eventually the realization came to me that it was time to invest in some serious storage. I looked around and the DNS-323 has a very large “hacker” following; meaning there are lots of people messing with and tweaking the device. (I think it runs a version of BSD) To me when something has a fairly dedicated DIY or “hacker” following that’s a good sign that you will find a lot of community support and there is a good chance that even if the manufacturer doesn’t add a certain feature a community member will find a way to add it.
When I got home from work I was chomping at the bit to get the DNS-323 setup. I unwrapped the hard drive a Western Digital 500 gig drive with 16 megs cache OEM. I unpacked the DNS-323 and quickly looked over the quick start directions. It all looked pretty much straight forward so I proceeded to install the drive which slid right in. I got all the cables routed and connected then I logged in to my router to get the IP address. Once I had the IP address I pasted it into to my browser and up came the DNS-323’s Admin Login Screen. I logged in and it prompted me to format the drive which I did. Once the drive was formatted I set the device to use a static IP address so I wouldn’t have to search for it on the network again and then updated the firmware. Again it was all straight forward updating the firmware was comparable to updating the firmware on a Linksys router.
Next I transfered all my converted movie files to the DNS-323. These are files that I stream to my XBox 360 to watch videos. 45+ gigs worth of data. It took a while. I was getting transfer rates of about a Gigabyte every 2 minutes and 4 seconds which works out to about 8.12 Megabytes (MBps) a second. Since I don’t have Gigbit ethernet (yet!) the theoretical maximum transfer rate on my wired network is 100 Mbps a second which translates to 12.5 MBps.
For some reason or another network speeds are measured in bits per second but hard drives are measured in bytes. There are 8 bits in a byte. Since bytes are larger than bits they get a big “B”. So MBps is shorthand for Megabytes per second and Mbps is Megabits per second. One tap of the shift key makes a bit difference. Whenever I am dealing with network speeds I like to eventually break it down to Megabytes since that is what I think of when I think of moving data . If I have a 8 megabyte file and I transfer its contents across my network at 8 MBps I know it’s going to take about a second.
I was pretty pleased with the transfer rate, but it still took 90+ mins to transfer the 45 gigs of files, but after the transfer was complete my next test was to see if I could stream the video files from the DNS-323 to my Macbook and then out to the XBox 360. Unfortunately at the moment the DNS-323 cannot stream directly to the XBox. I believe Microsoft is blame for this since they want to use their media center software to stream to the XBox.
Anyway my first test wasn’t too promising the video was slow to start and was very jerky after it got going. So I figured I would reboot the Macbook and the router to see if that would help. My hunch was right and the reboots did the trick. I was able to pull the video from the network drive and stream it to the XBox 360 from my Macbook!!!
I will write a review of the DNS-323 once I have had the opportunity to play with it some more. I have a feeling I will be ordering another 500 gig drive in the near future.
– Jeremy