Entry level disk storage

[airdronian]

Have been putting together a music server system recently and hit a speed bump today with a hardware failure of the motherboard in my file server. I had employed an older pc as the file server, running OpenSuse with a mirrored array holding music and photos.

 

Spent several hours of our holiday today trying to recover the system, and when it became apparent that no stable operation was going to be achieved, I needed to look for another storage option.

 

I was interested in the Drobo, and may go to that route one day but the price of admission was too steep for now, especially when including the Droboshare. My retailer also lists the Thecus N2100 featured in the windows music server design on this site; tempting but it was special order only, and I was needing a solution quickly.

 

Enter the D-Link DNS-323 NAS device. It holds 2 sata drives with options for RAID 0, 1, and JBOD. It also has a gigabit nic and print server function. Picked this up for just over $200 cdn including a seagate 320 gb sata II drive. Added one of my existing 320 gb seagates and I was set for a new mirror.

 

Setup was easy enough aside from the slight omission in the instructions about how to turn the silly thing on. Thought I had a DOA unit until I tried the small unmarked black button behind the faceplate. I also appreciate the fact that the unit has energy saving functions, you can specify the time it waits before putting the drives to sleep. And it is small and easily fits on a desk, shelf or whatever.

 

The unit can also be enabled as an iTunes Server in it's options and seems to integrate well enough. I'm now loading the drive with albums in AIFF format, a task I intended to do anyway since the last collection was in mp3 @ 320 or apple lossless.

 

So far the DNS-323 is performing well. It may not have the features of the units mentioned above but seems to be a reasonable starting point.

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hey airdronian - thanks for the post! This kind of info really help people out. I obviously can't review or recommend every piece of equipment available, so your experience is very valuable here.

 

How are you connecting to the unit? Hardwired or wireless, or even USB?

 

Are you going to use the built-in iTunes function? If you do please let me know what you think of it. It's not something I've really got into, but I can see many others using this capability.

 

Thanks again airdronian!

 

[airdronian]

The dns-323 only connects via the gigabit nic. It is cabled to the wireless router that connects wirelessly to the laptop and airport express upstairs.

 

The iTunes function is enabled by default. This makes iTunes aware of the device which will appear under the Library section of the iTunes interface. It is integrated right into iTunes. Still need to check how best to utilize it.