Gadget User Blog

There is an emerging technology for people who need more storage at home (or in small businesses) and who don’t want to always leave every computer in their house on. It’s called ‘network attached storage’ and it basically means you can make an external hard drive available to your network without the need for it being attached to a PC.

The range of solutions is not huge at the moment for the consumer who doesn’t have deep pockets. We have tried the D-Link Network Storage Adapter (DNS-120) with some mixed results. Since the advent of Windows Vista, it has been a much better experience, it seems a lot more stable on the network and is always recognised by the operating system. [more]

It basically plugs into your network and provides space for two USB hard drives or flash memory card to be plugged in, thus making them available to all users on the network.

Well, that’s the theory, in practice it’s not quite that simple of course. But first things first, what the lousy folk at D-Link don’t make clear on any of their advertising or information for download is this — Buyer Beware — you can only use drives formatted in FAT32.

Now that’s fine for flash cards, but for hard disk drives it’s not, most large ones are formatted with NTFS – and they won’t work. There is a later firmware update that will allow you to read NTFS drives, but not write to them. What is annoying is that this limitation is not well documented in the ‘pre-buy’ material you can get about the DNS-120. Not a great deal of use.

However, if you’re over that hurdle and happy to continue, then the other problem is it’s just a pretty unreliable unit when operating under Windows XP (it seems to go better with Vista – better networking?).

Sometimes it shows up on the network okay, and other times it has to be restarted all the time to show up. I have found that it’s better not to let XP try and connect to the drives automatically on connection, I rather mount the disks manually each time. Bit of a bore, but at least I can get to them.

Under Vista you can map the drives and they seem to load on startup without too much trouble, although the wireless laptop doesn’t find them as the wireless connection kicks in too late after the operating system has tried to connect to drives. I don’t know how to slow that process down so for now they are just found in network places rather than as mapped drives. So, our honest view is if you want to add one of these to computers running Vista, you will find it quite useful, for computers running XP it can be a bit hit and miss. All in all,  there is still a way to go before the DNS120 network storage adapter delivers on its promise.

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