SmallNetBuilder

Logging And Other Features

The last features I explored were logging and a few other miscellaneous functions. Figure 16 shows the menu where you can choose among several different log files.

Figure 16: Log selection screen

Everything from system changes, to backup events, to logins, to currently logged in users can be viewed in the log file. Figure 17 shows an example log file, where among other things, you can see when I plugged in an external drive.

Figure 17: System log

And you can see that it flagged the fact that my external drive was getting full. I don't think I've seen any consumer-level NAS device with more logging capabilities than the DS-106e.

The last interesting menu I checked out was the Hardware Manager, shown in Figure 18.

Figure 18: Hardware manager

In this menu, there were some useful options. The first allows the device to automatically boot back up after a power failure. This is the first time I've seen this in a consumer NAS device and it is appreciated. A number of times I've had a small power blip while I'm away from home, making my NAS drives inaccessible until I get back, realize what has happened, and power them back up. But with this feature, the device would come back up all on its own.

The second option allows you to turn on disk write-caching for disks that support it. The last option allows you to specify a drive spin-down time. With this turned on, your drive will spin down when idle lowering both your noise level and your power bill.