X-bit labs

Network Storage System with 2 Bays: Linksys NAS200 Review (page 5)

Category: Other

by Platon Scheblykin

[ 04/13/2008 | 04:14 PM ]

Administration

So, most of the NAS’ settings can be found in the Administration section.

Status is the first page in the list showing information about the available disks and the overall status of the NAS200.

And there is the first flaw you can see here: there is no info about the current temperature of the hard disks. Temperature monitoring is vitally important for a device with such feeble ventilation. The internal HDDs were indeed very hot at work.

On the Users page you can create accounts of users who can access the NAS200. When creating a user account, you can specify additional rules, for example a quota on the amount of transferred data, the right to access the download manager, etc.

Freely accessible resources are specified on the Shared Folders page. You can also set the level of access of different NAS users for each resource.

System Options is the largest page of all. It contains settings pertaining to the NAS200’s operation modes. There are a few subsections here:

• Identification. You can specify the device’s network name and workgroup
• IP Address. You can enter the device’s IP address and gateway
• DNS Server. Up to three DNS server addresses can be specified
• WINS. The address of an external WINS server is specified here
• DDNS. The settings of a Dynamic DNS account are provided here
• Data & Time. These settings define the NAS’ system time
• E-mail Alert. You can specify up to three a-mail addresses for sending notifications in case of failures in the operation of the NAS.
• Scheduled Shutdown.
• Download Manager. Here you specify the parameters of the integrated download manager and its operation schedule.
• UPnP. You can enable UPnP support here.
• Options. This subsection contains some settings of the access to the FTP server and web-interface.

Next goes the Firmware Upgrade page. Besides updating the firmware of the NAS200, you can save the current settings into a single file.

The Media Server page is about the integrated UPnP media-server. You can specify up to four locations to be sources of various multimedia content.

The Disk Utility page offers three integrated disk tools to format the disks, to scan the disks for errors, and to monitor S.M.A.R.T. parameters. You can also set up the sleep mode for the internal HDDs and set the storage threshold.

Disk Configuration is the last page in the list. You can specify the operation mode of the internal HDDs here.