SmallNetBuilder

More Features

In addition to being used as a NAS device, the CN-570 has the less common ability to also be used as an external USB 2.0 drive (but not at the same time). My tests showed this worked as designed. I powered the unit down, removed the Ethernet cable and plugged in a USB cable that was connected to my computer's USB port. When I powered the unit back up, the device was accessible as a standard external drive.

This feature worked under my Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems. This could come in handy for moving large files around, since a directly-connected drive will always outperform a network attached drive.

Figure 6 shows the "Device" menu where several options can be defined.

Figure 6: Device Setup

It was nice to see that the time on the box could be set via NTP, and that the default web configuration port could be changed from the standard 80. Note that secure configuration via HTTPS was not supported.

The CN-570 also includes an FTP server. Figure 7 shows the FTP configuration screen where the service can be set up, the port changed, and the default character set defined.

Figure 7: FTP Setup

When I selected the "USB" menu, I thought I would see the status of anything connected to the external USB port. So I was a bit surprised to see my internal drive listed (Figure 8).

Figure 8: Disk Status

This was strong hint that the internal drive was actually connected via a USB to IDE bridge instead of being directly connected as an IDE device. This menu also showed the USB printer I had connected (Figure 9) in order to test out the print server feature.

Figure 9: USB Printer

Unfortunately, when I went through the steps to try the printer out, I never got a printout. I tried printing from both my Windows and Mac OS systems and in both cases received neither a prinout nor error message.

Another interesting feature that the 570 includes is a UPnP AV media server. I've seen a few NAS devices with this capability, but it's pretty rare in a low-end box like this one. Figure 10 shows the setup menu which allows you to specify which shares the server should supply media from.

Figure 10: UPnP Configuration

As far as UPnP AV configuration goes, this menu was pretty sparse with no way to name the server, tell it how often to scan for new files, select more than one share, etc. Tests with a UPnP AV player on my network showed the capability worked well with my only complaint being that I had to disable and re-enable the server in order for it to recognize newly added files. I assume that if I had waited awhile, it would have picked them up on its own, but it would have been nice to have an option to tell the system to scan more frequently or immediately.