D-Link ShareCenter+ 2-Bay Cloud Network Storage Enclosure - DNS-327L product reviews

Many years ago, as payment for some work I did for a young company, I was presented with a 2-bay NAS unit. I thought all my christmases had come at once - FINALLY, I could retire that noisy old WinME PC stuffed to the gunnels with spare hard drives, and store all my files in my own little home-based cloud.

Now, that old NAS has aged, and though it has aged well, time has indeed taken it's toll. Noisy fans, a network interface that drops out at random, and it's managed to kill a couple of HDDs in the process. So when this little baby strolled across my desk looking for a home, I knew I had to have it. After all, the sheer size of some of the PSD files I generate is astounding, and even with 6TB of storage in the main workstation, I still run out of space... and blank DVDs... regularly.

Thanks to a couple of 2TB HDDs from Seagate we now had a decent storage system in place! Figuring I would sacrifice redundancy for space, I chose not to RAID these drives, instead setting them up as 2x 2TB storage blocks - one to hold all of the raw art files and digital photos, the other to hold all of the finished PSD files and processed photos. This proved the smart choice, because after migrating all of the data off the old NAS, and adding the files that were bottleneacking the workstation, well over 3TB of data was sitting on the NAS, and that meant striping or mirroring would not have been viable options. However, it was good to see that with the four main configurations supported, this unit is extremely flexible in it's application.

Speaking of application, something that really stunned me was the ability to download and install apps into this unit. Expanding functionality without requiring a firmware upgrade - a risky venture that has killed a couple of our devices in the past - is something that I haven't encountered in a NAS before. While some of the apps left me wondering "Who would ever use that?!" there were enough that looked appealing that I thought I might as well give them a go. These included the "ajaxplorer", "joomla", "blog", "phpBB" and "phpMyAdmin" packages - all very geeky and web-dev'ish but they were all surprisingly easy to download from the Resources section of the D-Link website (http://www.dlink.com.au/tech/download/download.aspx?product=DNS-327L) and install. My only critique is that this sort of workflow would be better if it could all be done directly from within the NAS UI - having to use a browser to download them, then go into the NAS to install them seems a little clumsy by today's "integrated" standards.

While I found the User Interface quite stylish, and mostly easy to use, the login system was particularly annoying, semi-randomly refreshing the password field and causing me to either type at near-lightspeed or risk having my password corrupted and the login rejected. I am not sure if this is a glitch in the NAS or in my wireless keyboard however, and since I no longer have a wired keyboard to test the theory, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it was the keyboard. However, if you find the same thing happening to you, know that you are not alone in your frustration! Still, this provided an excellent incentive to plan out my admin work in the NAS carefully, get it done, and get out again without undo dithering.

The unit itself is a breeze... as long as you follow the instructions. One of the best parts, I thought, was the inclusion of screw-on handles, allowing easy removal of drives as needed, through the clip-on lid. This makes drive swaps and upgrades simplicity itself, requiring only the two handle screws per drive to deal with. Setup was simple, with minimal configuration required for basic use, however if you are of the type, there are options and capabilities galore to explore - media streaming, built-in P2P filesharing, FTP/HTTP fileserver, access control... quite the plethora. And of course, when hooked into your myDLink account, you have anywhere-access to the files on the unit. When you throw in the sheer stylishness of the unit, and the near-silent operation, plus the fact it makes full use of the gigabit Ethernet bandwidth, then this drive proved itself to be invaluable, speeding up our intranet by 22% overall! That equates to around 35 working hours per month we can devote to other tasks.

Overall... Gosh, we're all really impressed down here, I can tell you!