Usage & Benchmarking

Using D-Link's utility, I'm able to discover the DNS-323 on my network. The utility also lists the available shares on the drive, and gives you the ability to map them to a drive letter in Windows. As long as you don't remove this drive letter, Windows will reconnect to the drive each time on startup.

Since the device is using the Samba protocol to share files, it's easy to mount the shares from Linux or Mac just as well. In OS X, I was able to enter the DNS-323's IP address in Finder and mount shares that way. In Linux, I had a few options. Konqueror can browse Samba shares, so I was able to access the different shares. However, I wanted a more permanent option, so I added a few lines to one of my startup scripts.

The drive actually uses the CIFS protocol, which is an improved version of Samba. It works much the same, but doesn't have some of Samba's limitations. Mounting is simple:

mount -t cifs -o username=netuser,password=hiddenword //255.255.255.255/share /home/username/destination

With the DNS-323 shares now accessible, I decided to run a few speed tests to see how efficient the device was. The first test I ran was copying a 700MB file from my computer's 36GB Raptor hard drive to the device, and then back. I repeated this test for RAID0, RAID1, and individual configuration for the device to see how the speeds changed. These tests were carried out from both Linux and Windows, and the speed difference was indistinguishable.

Following this, I also benchmarked the device using its built-in FTP server using the same parameters.

Let's examine our results on the next page.