Design
It had to happen sooner or later — a four-bay version of D-Link's excellent DNS-323 has surfaced, the unsurprisingly named DNS-343. It follows the same design ethos: black box, just a little taller. The most stark departure is an OLED screen on the front panel, which gives helpful status updates (including what IP it's currently running on), drive capacity readouts and health reports (complete with the occasional spelling mistake like "formating"). You can cycle through these by pushing the "Next" button underneath it, and after a period of disuse it goes into a screen saver mode.
The front panel is still lifted off to insert the drives, and the rear is nearly as spartan, with two fans, the levers for releasing the drives, a USB port for the print server functionality, and the gigabit Ethernet port. It's not the quietest unit in the world, but stuck in a corner it shouldn't be too much of a worry. A single cable retention clip hangs out the back, looking a little lonely.
Features
Like the 323, the 343 comes with a ridiculous amount of features. It supports DHCP and manual IP setting; jumbo frames; NTP time updates; user groups and quotas; FTP, UPnP AV, iTunes and DHCP servers. It also supports LLTD; email alerts on space status, full volumes, failures and temperature issues; power management; DDNS configuration and disk error checking. Scheduled downloading is included as well, but only on the HTTP and FTP fronts — BitTorrent is nowhere in sight.
On the RAID front there are two ways of approaching it — through the "Basic Configuration" method that accesses "Standard", which allows all drives to be formatted as separate volumes, JBOD, RAID 1 and RAID 5. There's also "Custom Configuration", which offers a combined RAID 0/JBOD mode, RAID 1/JBOD mode and RAID 5/JBOD mode, effectively splitting the volumes in half. Other than flexibility we're not entirely sure on the benefits of this, and D-Link doesn't offer any further thoughts in its manual either.
Performance
Hooking up over a gigabit network and transferring over SMB and FTP, we saw transfer speeds both to and from the NAS of 21MBps and 30.1MBps respective to protocol — a decent result.
D-Link's DNS-343 is the natural follow up to the two-bay equivalent, and shines just as well. If you need an affordable, good quality NAS, it's a tough one to pass up.
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