EcrosTechWiki | NetworkStorage / The History of Natasha

Our First Network Attached Storage Device

We've had a network attached storage device in our home since 2008 - the D-Link DNS-321. To avoid saying "the network attached storage device" all the time, my wife and I call it "Natasha". This also helps us remember that it is mapped to our computers as drive N:\. It holds two Western Digital 500 GB “GreenPower” Caviar GP hard drives ("spinning rust") in a RAID 1 configuration. It has worked flawlessly for 15 years, but is now showing its age. Noticeable annoyances are:

As it spends almost all of its time in standby, there's a lag of five to ten seconds in getting access.
It takes quite a while to transfer large amounts of data. As a result, I've not maintained an off-site copy of what's on Natasha. Therefore I don't have a proper disaster-proof backup plan in place and if the house burned down all our files would be lost.
The DNS-321 is not expandable. More modern devices include USB ports for the attachment of external drives (hard drives, SSDs or even USB flash drives). These can be made available on the network.

All-in-all, it's past time to consider an upgrade. If nothing else, I'd like to take advantage of the almost-instant wake-up and higher speed of modern solid state drives. In addition, although I considered power consumption in putting Natasha together (since its on all the time), it does run noticeably warm and there must be lower power solutions available today.

Here's the DNS-321 on the D-Link Web site. The last day of support was 5/5/2013. The last released firmware was 1.03, 10/09/2009.
Here's the WD Green / GP on the Western Digital Web site.