Over the last 3 or so years I’ve been running a Windows Home Server and everything was well. Then, a few months ago, a very high pitch noise started coming out from one of the 7 hard drives in it. The problem was, there wasn’t an easy way of telling which one was making the sound.

To stay on the safe side I decided to run to a store and grabbed me the cheapest 2 bay encolosure that was in stock. Turns out I got very lucky.

I ended up with Dlink DNS 323 which after a brief search online yielded complete how-to hack wiki. In just 10 minutes following instructions I converted a pretty dumb enclosure to a full linux box.

Once you SSH into 323, a world of possibilities opens up. First order of business was to install optware and from there, most of the common software is available in precompiled, ready to go form. I’m not a *nix expert by any means, but with help of the wiki and occasional googling 323 presented almost no trouble what so ever.

Here’s what I really like about 323:

1. Efficient – 15-25 watt power consumption (reference) makes running 24/7 essentially guilt free.
2. Very quite – can’t even hear the drives 5 feet away
3. Gigabit ethernet
4. Runs linux – fuck yeah!
5. Super easy to hack

In the next post I’ll talk about what I have installed on 323 to transform it from an enclosure to a server.