The D-Link DNS 323 is a domestic Network Attached Storage device which looks like this, only smaller.

It's a box with a small embedded Linux machine in it, a couple of slots for SATA II hard drives, and a gigabit network adapter. Oh, and it's got flashing blue LEDs on the front and a "brick" power supply.

Here's some random information about this device.

1 Good, Bad, Ugly

1.1 Good

• The drives just slot in without tools or fuss.
• The enclosure has been around for a while - the firmware is currently at v1.5 and the revision history shows some important fixes have been made. Personal experience suggests that with embedded Linux devices this is often the case.
• It works out of the box with the more modern Microsoft security systems. Vista partictuarly put to death a number of weaknesses dating back to the Lan Manager days (I was there, I know). Linux systems which aren't using up to date Samba drivers for example may have difficulties with Vista communications.
• It works. The fan's quiet and the brick runs cool.
• Power consumption runs at 9W turned off through 15W at idle to about 30W peak; at 10p a KW/h that's about three quid a year.

1.2 Bad

auto reboot

I'm not sure why a device like this wasn't built to auto-start on power-on, but several of these "domestic" devices seem to work the same way in this respect. Someone pointed out that it's not a huge problem to make something to "flip the switch" once power is provided to the device, possibly with the picaxe microcontroller. I'll proabably end up building that, but it shouldn't really be necessary.

• The only supported drive format is ext2, with ext3 rumoured to work and perhaps to be shipped later. This isn't brilliant unless you have a Linux box around should you need to read the drive without the NAS. On the other hand the file system does support quotas and is rumoured to be reasonably robust. This open source driver should allow the drives to be mounted and read from Vista, although I've not tried it.
• The blue lights are a bit bright; I may need to tape those up.
• It doesn't reboot on power-up, so someone's going to have to go and kick it when the power cycles.
• The login security is a bit odd - you can crash the box's web server trivially if you can see its IP address.

1.3 Ugly

Actually it's quite pretty; prettier than it looks in the picture and better than other D-Link gear I've had in the past. Except for the blue flashing lights, which must have been sexy technology when the industrial designer crafted this one.

3 Links

• User forums
• D-Link UK downloads
• D-Link sales page
• DNS-323 Wiki
• Scan, a really good internet supplier. They're especially good on returns, which is the time when you really find out which suppliers you ought to use. Every time I've had stuff to return, Scan has handled that process efficiently and without me having to quote the various bits of English law at them. I'd actually pay more for that sort of service, but I don't have to do that.