NAS Network Storage for the Home and Advice for Device Manufacturers

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I expect that there will be a boom in storage device and services for the home market over the next couple of years. People are already consuming larger amounts of disk for audio, video, and images. With larger storage needs, backing up onto CD’s or DVD’s becomes more cumbersome. At the same time trends show that people are upgrading their PC’s less frequently. The result is that they are stretching the lifetime of their PC hard drives increasing the likelihood of experiencing a hard drive failure.In my case, I just needed more storage. I already use Amazon S3 and Jungledisk for backups. What I needed now was a large NAS to centralize and house all my digital photos and videos and wanted something with RAID capability for higher reliability.

I expect other consumers will be looking for similar capabilities, yet most of them will not have a technical background to understand these products and technical terminology. Sadly, I also think that the manufacturers of these devices will be missing an opportunity if they don’t simplify their marketing language and their products.

In my search, I chose the D-Link DNS323 because I wanted something basic and low cost. In the end, my 1TB RAID 1 NAS cost under $400. I also looked at Netgear’s ReadyNAS which seems to have more features, but is more expensive. Drobo also looked interesting, but purchasing the DroboShare also pushed up its price point.

Now I got the DNS323 to work, but not without some frustration and missed opportunities. Some specifics:

My device shipped with version 1.4 of the firmware yet the current version is 1.6. The average consumer won’t realize that they should upgrade their firmware. Manufacturers should really build in a step in the initial configuration of a home device to validate the firmware version and offer to upgrade as part of the initialization.
On upgrading the firmware, there were warnings that I may need to reinitialize the drives after some firmware upgrades. Whaaat? So when D-Link puts out version 1.7+ I’ll have to find a way to backup the RAID before upgrading? That policy may be best practice in a data center, but in the home, the average user won’t have a backup device nor the time to backup before upgrading.
The drive needs a reboot after initialization, but the reboot process fails and gives no error messages. I thought my system failed but got it working after doing a hard reset. I’m guessing the average user would either give up or call the support line for help.
There is minimal online help as part of the quick ‘wizard’ setup.
I still don’t have streaming working and have almost no help from the manual or online help on how to configure this function.

In my case, I’m still evaluating this product. It could be the perfect device for me, but sadly this device needs some better marketing, help functions, and operational functions if they want to be successful selling it to non-techies.

I’m reporting on this in my software blog because most of the issues I see in the DNS-323 are bad execution in implementing a software product. Poor documentation. Overuse of technical terminology. Complex, non-user friendly operations. Buginess.

Published on:

January 13, 2009

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3 comments:

Anonymous

There is actually a missed opportunity on a few different fronts here. From the hardware manufacturers it would be as simple as making the process of setup and management more user friendly, however the real missed opportunity is on the part of internet service providers. Cable companies and the like do not yet realize that they are providing computer services. All they really pay attention to is how fast a pipe they can get to your house (and other things like DHCP and name servers). There are additional services that they can also provide as part of a premium package such as NFS. They can frame the language in terms of backup protection for your computer or a way to make it easy to upgrade your computer without having to migrate all your files. Eventually the need will be great enough for people to start looking for backup solutions and my guess is that the cable companies will be blindsided by an internet startup (which probably already exists. e.g. www.idrive.com). They will have to play catch-up because they really weren’t thinking of it and it’s not part of their ‘core business’. It’s a real and common problem in corporations where they can’t step outside their core business; ask Xerox. Hardware manufacturers don’t yet feel the need to support novice home users (also not part of their core business). Apple’s ‘Time Capsule’ is the first step in changing that attitude.
Dan

I have an HP branded Windows Home Server, and it’s been treating me very well. I bought it to automate my home backups, but it has some other nice features that I have started to use. It runs a streaming iTunes server. My XBox 360 can see it, so so I can play videos from it on my TV. It also provides an ability to establish an RDC connection from anywhere on the internet to my local PCs – it coordinates with my router via UPnP (I believe) to handle the NAT issues. It’s basically a Drobo that runs a slimmed down copy of Windows Server.

I was amazed at how easy it was to get working, especially for a first-gen Microsoft product (it was the first commercially available WHS). It basically just sits there, coordinating with my desktop and laptop to perform nightly backups, alerting me with bright red LEDs whenever anything goes wrong, and ready for anything I throw at it.

It was more expensive than a simple NAS, but I think it was worth it.
Unknown

Thanks for Sharing this Interesting Article!