dcmwai,
ckgraphic didn't say he was having a specific issue, unless he contacted you separately from this forum, he said he was concerned about potential problems. Also, he didn't mention a WD EARS drive, only a WD 2TB drive, which could very easily be a caviar green EADS drive which is definitely supported by the DNS-343. Now to answer your questions ck.
-No, there shouldn't be an issue connecting 10 PCs to the DNS-343, but you have to realize that the up/down rate for this machine is not what you would be getting out of a rack server. Most of the speed tests available on the net rate the machine at around 25mbs up and 35mbs down so keep in mind that if those 10 PCs are accessing the drives often and for large amounts of information, all at the same time, each individual machine is going to experience a lot of slowdown.
-Setting to RAID 1 shouldn't slow you down in a noticeable way. In fact, your down speeds should actually increase since the NAS can now pull from two drives for the same file. Unfortunately I haven't seen a speed test done on this NAS in RAID 1 mode since most of the testers are only interested in the RAID 5 capability.
-Yes you can leave the NAS on for long periods of time, especially if you're using WD caviar green drives (I assume you are since WDs other 2TB drive isn't supported).
-The Jumbo frame setting is somewhat debatable. I have seen speed tests that indicate that the DNS-343 gets best results from 4k packets, but it also depends on how you have your network set up. You can play with this setting if you like but it's probably not going to increase or decrease your speeds an incredible amount either way.
-You can definitely give it a static IP with no problem as long as it's accepted by your network.
-1.03 is currently the highest non-beta firmware available so no, you don't have to update right now.
-The issues people are having with RAID 5 are a combination of problems. A lot of people are unfamiliar with RAID 5 and don't have it setup correctly, especially since the DNS-343 uses ext2 and ext3. However, some forums have hinted that the RAID 5 settings are software based and not hardware based on this particular NAS which means that the software is eating up a lot of processing power just to stripe the data correctly which leaves little power left for the utility of transfer, thus slowing it down. It seems to me there is little question that RAID 5 is going to slow you down on this machine comparatively to RAID 0 or RAID 1 (although since I haven't seen speed tests on RAID 1 I couldn't say that for certain). Since you are running RAID 1 I wouldn't worry about it.
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Topic: Question on Raid 1, need advice (Read 2693 times)