Consumed Consumer . org

As I was running out of space on my DNS-323, I decided to upgrade my two 1 TB drives to 2 TB. Due to insufficient research into the matter, I was surprised to read, prior to performing the upgrade, that there are significant performance issues with these drives.

A while back (2006, most likely), I purchased several D-link Vonage locked ATAs, with the intention to try VOIP. They were cheap ($9.99) and figured that if I find that I do not like Vonage, I will unlock them somehow and use them with another provider. Though I have decided that I do not like Vonage, I was unable to unlock and abandoned the project. Now that I have a working VOIP setup, I decided to give unlocking one more try .

After a few attempts which ended in failure, I managed to format my 2 x 2TB 4k Western Digital drives . Now that it’s done, it seems incredibly simple. It is also “sticky”, meaning it does not need to be performed on each reboot (DUH!).

After my RAID-0 has recently failed catastrophically, the time has come to set up another pair of HDDs in my DNS-323. I figured a step-by-step howto on what I've done would not be useful only for me if I had to do it again, but to any other owner of this extremely popular unit. This is a rather long article, as it contains several smaller articles, but it is hopefully complete and suitable for a reinstall, cuz that’s the way I roll.

I once stayed at a hostel that had terrible Internet connectivity. This contrasted harshly with the superior customer service provided by the staff and the otherwise modern, cutting edge amenities. Let’s see how this problem could be solved.

As we shift our home to using more and more Internet services such as VOIP , it becomes necessary to replace the existing router, which is usually not able to handle well multiple connection and QoS. We are looking at the current alternatives on the market.

Now that we know what VOIP is and the hardware and the provider have been chosen, what's left is to do some finer configuration of our service and start VOIP-ing!

After successfully formatting my 2 new Western Digital 2TB discs properly, with the "advanced 4k option" , the time has come to move all the data from my existing 2TB array (1 TB + 1 TB in RAID 0) to one of the new drives. The quickest way to do this is to connect the drive via the NAS unit USB port.