Resolved Can one partiton a single drive in a NAS device?

I have a DLink 323 NAS and am only using it as a single back up drive. I have a 500GB HDD in the device and was looking to back up 3 networked PC's to it.
I originally formatted it via the DLink config panel and then created 3 folders on the drive. I didn't see any option to partition the drive during the configuration process.
If I had partitioned the drive into 3 partitions prior to running it through the config process, would I have been able to then configure the 3 different partions on the drive or would it have wiped the partitions and created a single one on me?
My thinking is that I would have 1 partition for each PC that I want to back up or, am I going about this all wrong?
I don't want to set the 323 up as a RAID as read/write speed is terrible (source: former experience with it).
Thanks

 

You can't normally do anything to a hard disk outside of NAS as NAS would most probably recognise the hard disk as unformated & would force you to partition/format it again. Its a limitation of NAS box and you can't do anything about it.

Creating a single partition with 3 different folder/directories for backup or 3 different partitions is almost one & the same thing. There won't be any speed gain nor security issues if you define which user has permission for which folder.

 

Thanks for the reply.
I hooked up the HDD to another machine and partitioned it but when I reinstalled it in the NAS it wiped the partitions and formatted it all as you indicated. I will go the 3 folders route as you suggest.
Security isn't an issue as the 3 machines belong to a husband & wife team.
Wait a minute, husband and wife... maybe permissions are paramount -

 

sorry, I always seem to forget this step

 

Thanks. This has a USB port but we were going to use it as a print server