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I agree a NAS or cheap PC would be a better choice for some. I often put clients into something along these lines, if they need. The PC build, though, is going to end up at a minimum of $400 and probably much more if you add that many drives. Most small NAS units I've dealt with have issues of their own, some of which cause data loss! That D-Link unit you linked to is one. See here for some well known issues. It's a nice option but hardly without issues.

The problem is really who gets paid to maintain whatever solution is chosen. Not everyone has or wants the skills needed. That's where an IT consultant can come in handy. Most of my clients with a server pay me $300 or more a year just for basic management tasks. Some places think they can't afford that so they try to do it all themselves instead. While that ends up making me a bit more on average when they screw something up, I see my task as preventing issues as much as possible.

Dropbox is pretty well hands off and while it's not always free there's no overhead for administrative tasks. That makes it a bargain for those who can fit inside the size limits. To get a server capable of the level of service Dropbox offers (again, aside from size limits for some folks) and maintain it will run more than $200 a year on average.

Out of my 500+ clients I have 2 who couldn't manage to fit into Dropbox if they needed to. One is a professional photographer and regularly has single image files over 1GB, I use a nice little NAS nowadays. He's got over 16TB of space and will need more before long, he says. The other client runs an architectural consulting firm; his data is close to 100GB in size although we could massage that into Dropbox if needed. Those are fringe cases, though. Most folks get by just fine with small-ish servers or USB drives of one sort or another. Some are switching into cloud storage options too, though.

tl;dr: Not everyone is capable of rolling their own box or even of filling a NAS with drives. Not Not everyone is able to properly manage a server, doing backups properly and so on. Not everyone has half a terabyte of picture, video & music files to back up. Dropbox (and some other cloud storage options) can be a cost effective solution for these folks.

All that said, I agree that other solutions exist and are compelling for some.

You can definitely have a full-fledged linux environment on one of the DNS-323 or DNS-321 NAS units from D-Link. Basically you just drop 1 file into your root directory, reboot, and you have telnet access. From there you can pretty much install anything in the repository of pre-compiled binaries. I switched from a 4-bay server tower to this little NAS about a year ago, and I haven't had any issues. I eventually want to get another, though right now I don't have the need. See http://wiki.dns323.info/ for info.

I use RAID 1 on it for the redundant backup and since it's only two drives, it's not RAID 5 like the OP was looking for. But for the rest of you out there, if you're looking for a 25W backup server, this is a good offering.

I am just in the process of evaluating a new server to replace my home rack-mount.

As the previous poster mentioned, if you don't need a lot of power, the D-Link DNS323 with two SATA drives might fit the bill. I just got one and put in two 500GB drives. So far, it is doing a good job replacing my home server for file serving, web serving, email, dns, dhcp, and rtorrent.

It cost about $300 ($160 for the unit, 2 x $70 for the drives on sale). The big payoff is that it uses (well, supposed to use since I haven't thrown the kill-a-watt on it yet) about 50W instead of the 250W that my current server uses.

200W * 24 hrs * 365 days / 1000 * .17 = $297.87 savings in power per year

It will pay for itself in 12 months.

jfyi, mainline linux kernel 2.6.25+ is expected to have dns323 support out of the box (check out the http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/nico/orion.git repository)

see also http://dns323.info/

With regards to not being able to upgrade the kernel - you can install debian on it (and no I don't mean as a chroot, although that is also possible).

For the "better samba" article, take a look at the history. Reidmefirst is me ;-).

Got a link with Debian instructions? The only set that I've found is here: link, which indicates that this hack is rather, well, hack'ish. In particular, you need to solder a serial port to the 323 main board in order to install debian as native. In my previous comment, I noted that one could change the firmware, but one had to hack the hardware first... ;-).

I still can't recommend this NAS for someone that wants a reliable/cheap/easy NAS. If making it usable means soldering, hacking firmware, &c, it seems that it would be simpler to just build a system, install two hard disks, and install [flavor of linux/bsd of your choice].

reid

Thanks for posting this. I just got a 323 after reading the following forum, which may be of use to others:

http://wiki.dns323.info/start

'didn't sound perfect, but has far fewer complaints then some other devices I bought (and regretted).

I've been contemplating this as well. I'm intrigued by the D-Link DNS-323 http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509

There's some hacks for it that allow you to add NFS and some other goodies: http://wiki.dns323.info/