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Finally bought a NAS solution: DLINK DSM-G600

1116 Views 14 Replies 8 Participants Last post by  chinch
So I finally gave in and bought the DLINK GSM-G600. I bought a 300GB IDE Drive to go along with it. The reason i went with this one is three fold.

1) It acts as a Wireless G access point

2) Can also attach 2 usb HDD's for a total of 3 drives.

3) Gigabit Ethernet port


So far so good. Formatted the drive in the EXT3 file format. It is kind of loud however so that's an issue. But other than that seems to work great. I haven't tested the wireless range yet but hopefully it reaches the bedroom.


Not sure what else to say other than it works.


Anyone have a question, not often i get to give back to the community.
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What is its standby power draw? I assume that it automatically goes into standby after some period of inactivity, right? Is it noisy when asleep too? What sort of data transfer rate to/from HDD do you get through the Gigabit port?
I set it to sleep after 5r minutes of inactivity, fan still hums away though. Right now I am running it only at 100mb i will soon upgrade to a gigabit router though, since my transfers do take a long time. 1 hour for 4 5gig movies. Figure to get 1/10th the time of that with gigabit ethernet.




I just added a soft modded xbox to the mix running xbmc. Wow what a great program, find the SMB share and even has picture thumbnails like my movies for each movie. With descriptions from IMDB just like my movies.


Modded xbox & SAN solution is absolutely incredible. I no longer have to buy a small pc for the living room, xbox media center does the job great. Im gonna drop another 100 for another xbox for the bedroom. Can't believe i didn't do this sooner.
Quote:
Originally Posted by skilzygw
Figure to get 1/10th the time of that with gigabit ethernet.
Then you will be disappointed - gigabit ethernet is only about 2-2.5 times as fast.
Quote:
Originally Posted by skilzygw
...1 hour for 4 5gig movies...
That's a bit slow.

How many routers/switches do you have in between? What cabling? How long?

A 25GB recording of the Oscar moves between 2 PCs and 2 Linksys routres in a bit under 40min in my case. Everything stock, no fine-tuning.


Diogen.
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1 Router built in switch.


It might have been faster, i honestly just sent 4 movies over and went to bed. The windows icon box said 50 minutes to go, but you know that thing is never accurate.



I can't recommend this setup enough. It's so easy and just works. Cheap and easy.

I would recommend maybe a quiter SAN solution, but other than that its great.



The speed will get better when i go to gigabit ethernet. But what i am going to do soon is connect an external USB 2.0 HDD to the san. That way i can transfer the files to the HDD via firewire or USB 2.0 and then just conenct it to the SAN when done.
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Thanks for the heads up - I've been waiting for a NAS that supports Gigabit ethernet. Does the DLINK support jumbo packets? If so, and the hard drives power down after a timeout period, this may be the thing to get...
Sounds like a neat little device. How much did it cost you?


In my experience, I've usually found spare parts lying around or bought a couple used parts to put together a full PC for my NAS needs....pretty cheap depending on what parts you have available.
Quote:
Originally Posted by maxleung
Thanks for the heads up - I've been waiting for a NAS that supports Gigabit ethernet. Does the DLINK support jumbo packets? If so, and the hard drives power down after a timeout period, this may be the thing to get...
Alas, it does not (with 1.01 firmware) power down the HDD nor fan. :( The "timeout" values it permits are simply related to automatic logoff of inactive users/administrators.


According to my Seasonic Power Angel, it consumes a constant 17 watts when just sitting there (making that awful fan racket). Perhaps, D-Link can be persuaded to add HDD & fan power-down in future firmware...?
Furthermore...it achieves only 5.6 Mbytes/s (i.e., about 50 Mbps) over my Gbit network when writing to a Seagate 500GB HDD that is capable of writing at least 6 times as fast as that, so the Gbit port that it sports appears to be purely decorative. :(
Hmmm, may explain long write times. However once the movie is there, the streaming has been flawless. Which in the end is what really matters.
I must be missing something with these little devices; I can get a full computer system (sans hdds) sent to my home for < $160 (ASUS Terminator C3, 256 mb ram 512 mb flash drive to boot an os from) which can support 4 hdds, comes with a 165 watt ps, ethernet and a pci slot for gigabit or wireless. Add NasLite if you don't want to configure an os. Why the interest in a box that requires additional usb enclosures and that you are locked into for about the same price? I'd think the computer was cheaper/more flexible since you wouldn't have to purchase the external usb enclosures. Thoughts...
Yuck, no hdd power down, no fan control (fan noise!), consumes a lot of power, very slow gigabit ethernet implementation. Forget it! To be fair though, I think the powerdown feature must be supported by the enclosures - I have not heard of any USB enclosures that support external hdd powerdown commands. The Maxtor OneTouch ones need a special utility to talk to the controller.


I still have my Linksys NSLU2 from more than a year ago - it is almost as fast and is silent (no hdd powerdown though).


mpenton - I agree - with the availability of low-power processors that can be run passively-cooled, it should be possible to build a low-cost PC for the price of a NAS and two enclosures. Especially with spare PC parts. :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by mpenton
I must be missing something with these little devices; I can get a full computer system (sans hdds) sent to my home for


Well in my case, i just didn't want to have a whole pc running 24/7. I preferred a nice small enclosure that i could stick anywhere.

The pc would be a better solution if it fit your needs. More storage, cheaper, faster, fault tolerence etc...
Quote:
Originally Posted by mpenton
I must be missing something with these little devices; I can get a full computer system (sans hdds) sent to my home for
i migrated my music library from my HTPC to a buffalo linkstation 250 because i didn't want the HTPC running 24/7, nor any other cheap PC due to power usage, virus subscriptions, windows updates, hassle factor, etc.


the small NAS holds all my photos and data files too so i have wireless access to all my data instantly from my two notebook PCs, HTPC and also via FTP remotely.


if you're not using a "media server" for DVR purposes i personally don't think they're the way to go for what i posted but YMMV.


it's nice to have options here :)
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