D-Link DNS-343 review

For network storage D-Link has maintained a low profile, preferring to focus on single- and dual-drive NAS appliances for consumers and small businesses. The latest DNS-343 moves its focus more towards the business angle, as this brings RAID5 into the equation for improved data protection.

It's a compact desktop box that feels solidly built, but note the matte-black coating on the aluminium chassis is easily marked. Drive installation is completely tool-free, as you push the front cover up to remove it and simply slide in up to four SATA hard disks, then give them a gentle push to mate with the power and interface connectors. Levers are provided at the rear to pop the drives out, but they're not hot-swappable.

A Gigabit network port is provided, but it's disappointing that the single USB port alongside can be used only to share a printer or attach an intelligent UPS - virtually all competing products support external storage devices. The front cover has a natty OLED display, which provides plenty of highly visible information about the appliance.

It makes installation easier, since it shows the assigned IP address so you can point a web browser at it. This opens with a quick-start wizard that runs through choosing from stripes, mirrors or RAID5 arrays, securing administrative access and setting up basic network details.

For testing, we installed a quartet of Western Digital Raptor SATA drives and set them up as a single stripe for performance. Shares are easy enough to create, and business users will find a reasonable selection of access controls are provided.

AD authentication is supported, the appliance offers a local user and group database, and you can apply quotas to each one to limit their storage space.

Compared with the latest NAS devices from the likes of Netgear, performance for the DNS-343 is pedestrian. Copying a 2.52GB video clip between the appliance and a Dell PowerEdge 1950 quad-core Xeon server returned read and write speeds of 27.6MB/sec and 15.7MB/sec. FTP speeds saw only a small improvement, with the FileZilla utility reporting speeds of 36MB/sec and 31.5MB/sec.

If you like music while you work the appliance offers an iTunes server that can password protect your music files and provides UPnP media services for streaming to suitable media players. Workstation backup is handled by the bundled Memeo AutoBackup, although the single-user licence won't impress businesses.

It supports a range of backup destinations including NAS appliances, and offers backup encryption. It's easy to use and, once backup is completed, it runs a background service that secures new or modified files on-the-fly.

D-Link also provides a tool for downloading files to the device over HTTP or FTP. You log in to a separate web interface and add details such as the source URL and a destination on the appliance for the copy.

The DNS-343 is a basic quad-drive NAS appliance that's easy to use, but it's short on features. The price for the diskless model may look good, but check out the PC Pro Recommended Netgear ReadyNAS NV+, which is well worth the extra outlay as it offers more business features.

Author: Dave Mitchell