The ShareCenter Pro 1200 is D-Link’s first storage appliance to unify NAS and IP SAN operations. Aimed at small businesses, this five-bay desktop box provides centralised storage along with plenty of backup facilities, and does so at an affordable price.
Build quality is good. The solid steel chassis provides a lockable front door, behind which lurks a bank of sturdy hot-swap drive carriers. Its pair of large cooling fans is quiet, and the OLED panel at the front shows IP addresses, storage usage and detected hardware faults – this display can’t be used to configure the appliance, though.
The two Gigabit Ethernet ports support load-balanced or failover teaming, and the pair of USB 2 ports can be used for external storage devices and printers. However, it has no eSATA ports, unlike the Synology DS1511+, so the Pro 1200 can’t be expanded with extra drive enclosures.
The appliance is sold diskless, so for testing we popped in a quintet of 1TB WD SATA drives. Using the tidy web interface and quick-start wizard, we rustled up a RAID5 array that took a couple of hours to build CIFS. NFS and FTP file-sharing services can be enabled individually, and shares are simple to create: first you select a volume, then provide a share name and set access restrictions for users and groups.
A global quota can be applied to each share to limit space usage, and the appliance can also be integrated into an Active Directory domain.
If you’re looking for features such as multimedia toys, IP camera recording or web and database serving, look away now – the Pro 1200 has none of the above. There’s an option to install extension packs, but D-Link’s support site doesn’t offer any at present.
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