D-Link DNS 323 Network Storage Enclosure

I have just installed an NAS enclosure received from D-Link and Mecer. The enclosure is a small, two bay enclosure and came with demo backup software called Memeo Autobackup. The enclosure is very compact (200mm L x 130mm D x 100mm W) and has space for two 3,5" hard drives of any capacity. I installed two 250GB hard drives. It was very easy to install the drives, no tools were required. It's virtually plug and play! What is nice about the system, it plugs onto your network via an Ethernet cable so is very fast and accessible to any other computer system on the network.

Once the unit is plugged in and switched on, it is simply a case of running the software (Easy Search Utility) and just following the steps. Once the drives are formatted and mapped - it's done.

There are four ways to format the drives - Standard (two seperate drives), JBOD which stands for Just a Bunch Of Drives - effectively in my case I would have had one continuous 500GB drive, Raid 0 (which is striping - apparently the best way if you want a speedy drive, and lastly, Raid 1 where you will have a 250GB (in my case) drive - x 2 and it will be mirrored so anything put on drive 1 will be duplicated on drive 2. This is the best way to make backups because if one drive goes down, the same info is on the second drive.

I have set mine up as 2 seperate drives as I have backups on DVD as well as these two drives. Effectively, I have 500GB of space.

The Memeo Autobackup software is very smart and once set up, anything done on your main computer drive is automatically backed up on the backup drive/s.

I can definitely recommend this unit (available from any Mecer dealer) - it sells for around R2400 (excluding the hard drives) and is a winner. For us photographers, this could very well be a life saver - storing thousands of photographs is a major problem and this unit helps to overcome that problem. Please don't hestitate to contact me regarding this unit. Contact - info@pixmanimages.co.za