D-Link joins the personal cloud space in its NAS box range
Not everyone wants the fastest NAS box or a massively flexible platform. Often they just want somewhere to store and globally access their files that isn't owned by Google, Microsoft or Dropbox.
D-Link's ShareCenter DNS-3271 is a revamped version of its incredibly cheap dual drive DNS-320L NAS box (now £39.99), whith brings personal cloud functionality to the table for an amazingly low price, if you provide your own drives.
For the extra outlay you get a faster 1,2GHz Marvell CPU, twice the RAM (512MB), volume encryption and, critically, cloud storage backup to Amazon S3, D-Link Vault and Google Drive. All ShareCenters support S3, but you'll need this one if you want to have bi-directional access to Google Drive.
This glossy, white, plastic box with an angled top is a sideways nod to Western Digital's MyBook designs, though internally it isn't quite as elegantly engineered. The lid detaches easily, revealing a metal tube that takes two 3.5" SATA drives, to be supplied by you, vertically.
To help you more easily remove the drives later, D-Link provides a couple of plastic handles that attach to the drives so they can be pulled out.
With only two drives your options are somewhat limited, but the system allows you to join the capacity of the two disks, keep them independent or mirror if they're the same size. There's a single USB 3.0 port on the back, which you can use for increasingly overall capacity using an external drive or for sharing a USB printer.
Drive installation takes only a couple of minutes, and you're ready to fire up the unit and complete the installation using software provided on a disc. The wizard can be downloaded online, and there's an Apple Mac version if you are that way inclined.
Wherever you find it, the installation wizard is way too clunky for this reviewer's taste, as it insists on configuring all manner of features that could easily be deferred until the system is actually operational.
It also creates a link to the mydlink website on your desktop calling explorer.exe from the system32 folder, where it doesn't live.
That mistake hints at a lack of polish in the software side of this equation, and the web interface supports that assertion. While it looks pretty, it's lacking in overall structural consistency and is missing some important obvious features. I've never before seen a NAS box that will install new firmware but hasn't the means to check if any new versions are available, for example.
Conversely, what features D-Link did put on the ShareCenter DNS-327L generally work well, and the file serving performance for such an inexpensive solution is good.
With a single 2TB drive installed I achieved consistent read speeds of 110MB/s and very acceptable writing performance of 75MB/S. That's on single large files, though multiple smaller files tended to be much slower, revealinqly.
The Google Drive functionality is also rather neat, once I'd eventually discovered where D-Link had hidden it. If you've got a headline feature, surely you make it appear by default?
Default settings were generally an issue, because the box never encourages you to create groups and users (that it supports), and when you've formatted the drives the newly created volumes are immediately available to anyone on your network.
This left me with the impression, wrong or not, that D-Link had decided to focus on the showboat features of its competitors without actually finishing its NAS OS platform beforehand.
That's a shame, because what it has isn't that bad; it just needs a very critical eye to weed out obvious errors and provide some sense of overall structure. The interface can't even decide if the limited software tools are 'addons' or 'applications', and there isn't currently an automated mechanism for D-Link to launch new ones and bring their availability to your attention.
The personal cloud end of the equation is equally haphazard, with it taking me at least three D-Link apps to find the one that would actually connect my Android phone. To get this functionality fully working I needed to go back to the web interface because enabling the UPnP AV Server feature doesn't inherently make multimedia shares available, frustratingly.
While I was able to get all I needed for the review out of the ShareCenter DNS-327L, I do wonder what a less technically minded and determined user might make of it.
What it has going for it is the low price, and acceptable file sharing speeds. However, you can pick up a Synology DiskStation DS214se for just another £20, so that price might not be cheap enough.
With NAS boxes the devil is certainly in the detail, and that's where the DNS-327L is somewhat lacking. I'm sure that D-Link will fix it, and when they does, the DNS-327L could be a very desirable piece of kit. Mark Pickavance
An inexpensive NAS box with some cloud functionality.