Blog of Death
D-Link's DNS-323 - The Cat's Ass of NAS
November 30th, 2006
I was surfing around today and stumbled upon this little unit. What caught my eye about this one is that it only supports SATA drives, and the benefit is how easy it is to swap out the drives. You simply slide them into form-fitted slots and give them a bit of a push to connect them (much like you'd load a cartridge into a Super Nintendo.) Two levers at the back help you eject the drives when they need to come out.
The last portable storage unit I bought (just a USB 2.0) was a cheapie little container, where you had to take it apart using two screws, connect an EIDE cable to the drive, screw the drive down to the PCB, and carefully put it back together. This is fine because this drive is only being used for backups, and I will rarely need to swap it out... but if you are serving files a small network and have a drive crash, upgrade, or other issue come up.... being able to swap quickly would be a definite bonus!Nice design, D-Link!
Permalink
http://www.oblius.com/blog/view.php?ID=26d2c316b1f6b44c16ec23a21c64d36d