New NAS

After my little disagreement with Rogers Cable which resulted in canceling my cable, HD, and PVR rental... I have been thinking lately about using a home computer as a PVR and buying a video tuner card for it and recording shows over-the-air. After pricing it out, this looked like a bit expensive since I don't have a computer at home so I would need the works... including a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.

So I talked to some friends at work and was recommended the D-Link DNS-323. I went out at lunch yesterday and picked it up (along with a 1TB drive for one of its drive bays) and last night I sat down to set it up. I had a few problems but in the end I got most things working.

First off when I did a network search I wasn't able to see the new drive. Turns out that it just so happened that yesterday was one of those days where I needed to reset my cable modem. (my laptop couldn't see the net either) Ok, no problem.

So I found the drive and went through the intial setup and formatted the drive. Then I went to the support page on the web site and downloaded the new firmware and installed it. Next step was to set up BitTorrent but I couldn't get it working... it would bring up a progress screen and then a dialog saying "Please check hard drive". That didn't sound good. 

After some searching on the web I saw that other people had the same problem and they were able to "solve" it by connecting to the network with another computer. That wasn't an option so after further research I discovered that it was a problem in that the Windows Workgroup for my laptop and the NAS didn't match. I just changed them to be the same and voila, it worked.

Step one was complete. I pushed some data to the drive and was able to stream it to my laptop. Next up was the task of trying to get the XBox 360 to see the drive. I was able to get the 360 to see my laptop but not the NAS. (and I don't want to have to go through a computer)

According to some people who had the same problem, after they upgraded to the new firmware they had to reset the NAS to the factory defaults and then after that their 360 was able to see it ok. I will give that a try tonight and then hopefully it will all "just work".