As you'll see later, the 323's performance is among the highest performing products in our NAS charts. A view inside the 323 reveals that Marvell technology is powering the 323. Figure 3 is a photo of the 323's chassis, where you can see the drive backplane plugged into the main circuit board.

Figure 3: DNS-323's chassis (click on image to enlarge)

Figure 4 is a close-up of the main board, where the components are clearly shown. The processor is a Marvell 88F5181, which is based on Marvell's proprietary Feroceon ARM CPU architecture. The SATA drive interface comes courtesy of a Marvell 88X7042 is a PCIe to Serial ATA Controller chip, while a Marvell 88E1111 "Alaska" single-port gigabit Ethernet transceiver handles the Ethernet port duties. The Marvell CPU must also handle the single USB 2.0 port since there don't seem to be other chips present for that function.

Figure 4: DNS-323 main board (click on image to enlarge)

Like most other consumer NASes, the 323 runs Linux. So if you want to try some hacking, visit the 323's GPL download page to get the sources you'll need.