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Author Topic: DNS-320 with Alt-F firmware  (Read 3961 times)

petehiggins

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DNS-320 with Alt-F firmware
« on: March 10, 2022, 03:55:23 PM »

I purchased a D-Link DNS-320 NAS in 2011. It was slow and their 2.05 firmware only supported up to 3 TB hard drives. I found freeware firmware called Alt-F that can be loaded on the DNS-320 (using D-Link's normal menu loading procedure) and supports two Seagate IronWolf ST8000VN004 -8 TB NAS Hard Drives . I loaded the Alt-F firmware and it formatted the new Seagate ST8000VN004’s using Ext 4 in a RAID 1 configuration resulting in a swap file and 7.2 TB of usable storage. I copied almost 4 TB of data to the old NAS, breathing new life into a previously pretty limited 2-bay NAS server.

Windows 10 showed a transfer rate between 8 MB/s and 10 MB/s, over a 10/100/1,000 Ethernet connection so it took days (literally) to transfer all my data, although I attribute that to the slow DNS-320 speed and not the hard drives. When you’re saving Word or Excel changes or backing up individual files instead of transferring ~4 TB of data this speed difference really isn’t noticed. I should add that that I saw roughly the same speed with the 3 TB drives installed and the DLink v2.05 firmware.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qkrui7TOVg-8sG7B9nR8W-3VnqgWLbWl/view?usp=sharing

It took almost 4 days to transfer 3.4TB of data. As can be seen from the status page (active during the transfer) the box temperature got up to 116 degrees during the transfer and the hard drives showed 114 and 111 degrees respectively. Per section 2.6.1 of their Product Manual, Seagate rates the operating temperature at 65 C (C × 9/5) + 32 = F) or 149 degrees Fahrenheit so even during days of sustained large data transfers the DNS-320 and the drives stayed well below the hard drives rated operating temperatures.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-0725VlBqLZI_kSl7O8KDuOcXytetRzs/view?usp=sharing

As can be seen from the second status page with the hard drives spun down or in standby mode the box temperature cooled to 104 degrees.

The third image shows the temperatures after a document on the NAS is edited.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-3-MRIJ5zo4LmrfU8ZBDpWM2XrTTNStn/view?usp=sharing

Note: Inserting the links to Google Drive with "Insert Image Icon" didn't work.
« Last Edit: March 15, 2022, 12:59:07 PM by petehiggins »
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