I’m becoming burried under a mountain of DVDs and have been thinking for a long time of setting up some sort of central file share or media server. The D-Link DNS 320 seems like a good entry-level model and I’m on the verge of buying one and slapping a couple of 3TB drives in it. It reportedly plays well with media consoles (I’ve got a PS3 that I brought with me from the states) and smart TVs, and it has a built-in iTunes server.
Although the network in this house is only 100MB wired, with three different wireless access points dropped in to service the more distant rooms. I’m not sure if those areas will get enough throughput to stream video, but my main concern right now is just to get my library set up.
I’m just wondering if there might be something else out there I haven’t considered.
I have a D-link DNS-321 with 2 1TB drives hooked up to my network. I use it as a backup drive for my computers and as a media server for the PS3/Xbox360. It works very well.
The only issue that I have with it is the data throughput. It claims to have a 1 Gigabit LAN, but I am lucky if I can get 100 megabit. However, 100 Mbit is more than fast enough to stream HD video. It is just a bit slow the first time you are populating the drives.
We have a very old HP NAS and a new Synology DS1512 that we’ve migrated most of our data over to. Both have performed very well for us.
The lessons learned so far are:
Buy the best fastest largest drives you can. No matter what you estimate you’re going to end up wanting to store more over time and replacing all the drives while maintaining your data is a pain. When we ran out of space we ended up buying a new unit just to make migrating the data easier.
Organize your data carefully, you’re going to have a large volume of it and ease of finding it is going to be important.
When you start noticing slow downs in retrieval check your drive stats. That’s been a key indicator of a soon to fail drive for us.
This may be less “entry level” than you’re looking for, and back when I bought it it seemed like crazy overkill, but I couldn’t be happier that I bought a ReadyNAS NV+ (now sold by Netgear). I have hardly done any fiddling with it in the 6 years I’ve had it, other than adding a third and then fourth disk as I expanded and having it email me twice: once when the UPS it’s connected to died, and once this summer when the basement got too warm for its taste. The one this summer made me go, “oh yeah, that thing can email me.”
Have you got any old PCs around? If so, FreeNAS and OpenFiler are worth a look.
They’re both free, and pretty easy to set up. It would give you a more flexible and upgradable solution, with the caveat that it takes up more physical room, and uses more power. Not sure what electricity costs are like in Thailand. As far as environmental friendliness, you have to weigh the increased power consumption vs. the recycling of old equipment.
I also have a DNS-321 with a pair of 1 TB drives in Raid 0, I use it for media storage and data backup. It’ll crash every couple of weeks and need to be reset, but other than that I have no issues.
I use a computer downstairs with 2 - 2TB drives for media. It has one of the latest intel chips and a ssd for the os drive but its overkill. Standard lan no gigabyte or anything and we watch hd content all the time. I run tversity on it to serve movies and photos to my PS3 which in turn sends it to my big tv. Works very well and we love it. I have thought about just building a media computer however I needed a bluray player and the ps3 was priced right.
Unfortunately I am somewhat limited in terms of the available technology. A few of the competing solutions like that caught my eye (like Synology) just aren’t available here, unless I go to a high-end import shop and pay a three-hundred percent markup.
I’m not that excited about the idea of building a server or repurposing a pc; I’d rather get a dedicated appliance that has an established support/user community behind it.
Although after doing some reading in the D-Link forums, I see the latest DNS 320 firmware release (which is required for 3TB HDD support) is intended only for the North American market. They specifically caution users in SE Asia not to apply this update (or do so at their own risk). Without that, I’ll be stuck at 2TB.
this looks interesting and still affordable, although I don’t think I’ve seen it during any of my recent window shopping. I’ll ask a few vendors about it next time.
I’ve had two DNS-323’s on my network for years now (currently each has two 2TB drives in RAID-1 for 4TB of fully-mirrored storage) and have been very happy with them. (And I believe the DNS-320 is just a slightly newer version of the same thing.) One of the biggest pluses for me is their incredibly low power usage – I did some searching a while back and I seem to remember it’s something like 5-10 watts on average. Far, far lower than keeping an old PC on all the time. Of course, the flip side of this is you have to wait 30 seconds or so for them to wake up when you first access them on any given day.
The RAID-1 feature is quite simple – a little light blinks when a drive fails, you pop in a new one and tell it to rebuild using the web interface: super easy.
The only negative for me is the effective 100 Mbit speeds mentioned by Scoobysnax – it’s something fundamental like the drive controller not being able to go faster than that, making the gigabit ethernet spec somewhat misleading. But 100 Mbit is more than fast enough for video streaming, it’s mainly just a slight pain that I can’t copy files to and from it at the full speed of my network.
I used the power savings to justify replacing my old Dell PC (about 100W) which had been running for 7 years or so with a new dual-core Zotac AMD mb (~30W) recently. The new MB went into a spare case I had, laptop style PSU, passive cooling. Runs great, quiet, and I could probably get the disks to spin down for more savings.
I run SME linux (Centos) with Serviio as a media server (java based DLNA server, cracking good product). Probably not what most people want, but I get it doing a ton of things I want it to do.
It says right on the product page “This item cannot be shipped to your default shipping address”. I’m getting used to that with Amazon and IT stuff. I often have to resort to extremes like having a friend in the US buy something and repack it to look like a used item, and then ship it to me using a Thai friend’s name and address (or physically carry it here if they plan to visit in the near future). IT stuff that is shipped here to recipients with Western names are sometimes held hostage at the post office, pending outrageously high import duties. Add to that, US warranties often go void the moment a product leaves the country, and there may not be any authorized service centers here and, well… it’s often just not worth it if I can’t find a local dealer.
Now having said all that, they do list two resellers in Thailand on their web site. I’m going to fire off an email for some price quotes and see what they say.
