As more and more of our digital photos and videos and music are stored on our home networks, the parents computer as well as each of the kids computers , a laptop and the media center PC in the living room, sharing all this stuff between users becomes harder and harder but more important than ever. This is where D-Link’s new 2 drive bay NAS device comes in handy.

The DNS-323 Network attached storage device allows you to share all your digital assets to all the pc’s on your network.

The DNS-323 doesn't come with hard drives--leaving you to choose what amount of storage to add. It's very easy to open the device to access its two hard drive bays. Just remove the front cover and slide in the two SATA drives until they connect that’s all there is to it.
 The D-Link-DNS-323 has a simple, design with all the ports (Ethernet, USB, Gigabit and Power) on the back. On the front is the hard-drive bay cover that has the power button and three blue activity status lights, one for each hard drive and the network port.

After you physically install the drives, the setup is easy. You just connect the DNS-323 to your network and turn it on. By default, it's setup to receive an address from your network's DHCP server, but if it doesn't receive one, it defaults to 192.168.0.32. For initial configuration, D-Link supplies its Easy Search utility that will search your network regardless of IP addressing used and find the DNS-323.
The utility lets you assign a static IP address and enable/disable the DHCP client. Once you've initialized the drives, you can connect to them and map a drive letter from within the utility if you like. Or a click on the Configuration button takes you to the DNS-323's web-based administration page where a wizard is available to help you through the initial configuration of your hard drives. The DNS-323 supports four drive configurations: No RAID, RAID 0 (Striped), RAID 1(Mirrored) or JBOD. JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) is an interesting setup that, similar to RAID 0, merges two hard drives. JBOD combines the drives in a linear way, meaning the combined storage is the total of the two hard drives even when they are of different sizes. (With RAID 0, the combined storage is always the size of the smaller hard drive multiplied by two.)
After you decide how you want to configure your disks, the DNS-323 will format the drives. The DNS-323 supports EXT2 (default) and EXT3 file formats. All data will be lost, so if you're installing a previously formatted disk that contains data you had better have it backed up somewhere! Once the drives have been formatted, the 323 will reboot, and you'll be ready to start configuring.
The D-Link DNS-323 also has five servers to provide additional function and value. With the exception of the built-in print server that doesn't require configuration, each of these servers is also configured on the advanced tab. There’s an UPnP AV server, which enables media players located on the network to stream pictures, music and video from content stored on the NAS.
It also has a iTunes server it's enabled by default so all you have to do is enter an iTunes password (if you want one) and point it to your music directory. Any iTunes client should be able to automatically find and connect to the DNS-323's iTunes server.
The 323 includes a built-in DHCP server, but you probably won't use it as most routers have one built in, But, if you need a DHCP server, the 323 provides a very basic one. D-link's DNS-323 also has an FTP server and a single USB port on the back panel that's used to connect USB printers to the built-in print server.

D-link definitely has a winner in the DNS-323 not only does it have good performance but you can’t ask for much else for the price and options.