Network Storage for the Home with the D-Link DNS-323 - Configuring

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Once formatted, the device resets and runs a very well produced web-based interface that allows you to configure and secure the device. You can do everything here that you'd expect, such as setting the administrator password, creating users, assigning or resetting their passwords and much more. There are different sections for each of the built in functions such as the FTP server, iTunes server and the UPnP server.

It also provides a status page which provides a lot of information about the current state of the device including LAN information, such as the current IP address and MAC address, information on the attached printer, and drive information such as the total and used drive space. It even lists the temperature of the device! Finally, a support page provides detailed information that explains all of the different options in the interface utility.

All in all, the complete basic setup, from unpacking, connecting, formatting, configuring and finally using was very quick and easy. I encountered no problems at all in the initial setup; the setup utility detected the formatted drive and mapped it to my computer without any issues, and the device formatted my hard drive without a problem. It gets mapped to your computer as a network drive rather than a local drive like the SC101, and once it has been set up and configured on one computer, the setup utility doesn't need to be run for other computers on your network; you can just use the Map Network Drive function of Windows Explorer to map to it, which certainly saves time. No special drivers or software need to be installed.

One issue that I did have with it was that I chose J (the next available letter) as the drive letter assigned to the device; however, when the device is not connected, J is the drive letter assigned to my USB flash drive when this is connected. If I am mapped to the device, then insert my flash drive, the flash drive does not get assigned a new drive letter. This may be due to a problem with my machine of course, and if the device is assigned to a different drive letter it is no longer a problem, but I felt it worth mentioning.

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