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Setup and Configuration

Setup of the Ethernet Disk RAID involves several steps in addition to plugging it in and connecting it to your network. LaCie provides a simple Windows-only discovery utility (Figure 5) that discovers your EDR on the local network and provides you with a link to the web-based management console.

Figure 5: Storage System Console discovers the EDR on your network

When you log onto the Storage System Manager, your connection is via HTTPS. You’ll receive an invalid certificate warning from your browser as the certificate is issued by “storage server”. I didn’t find a way to update the certificate on the EDR, so you’ll either have to accept the certificate or live with the warning each time you log on.

Upon first log on, there’s a first run wizard. This wizard prompts you to initialize the disks into one of the RAID configurations. Next, you’re prompted to decide how much space on the RAID to commit to shared folders. The default is 200MB.

The LaCie Ethernet Disk RAID is supplied with backup software for backing up local computers to the NAS. Only one license is supplied, but you can purchase additional licenses to back up more than one local computer. If you plan on backing up computers to your NAS, the instructions recommend you only allocate the minimum amount to shared folders because backups are stored separately from shared folder.

You can always allocate additional space to shared folders, but you can’t de-allocate space. If you allocate all of the space to shared folders and then later decide that you want to also use the NAS for local backups, you’ll have to re-initialize the drives (all data will be lost). After the initial setup, the home page of the browser console looks like this:

Figure 6: Home page of the Ethernet Disk RAID management console

The menu interface is simple. Across the top of the screen you’ll find the main menu items. As you click on each menu item, the sub-menu options appear in a vertical menu on the left of the screen. The EDR supports both CIFS (windows/Mac OSX) and NFS clients, though you have to choose which type of client when you create the user. 

You can also create groups of users (Figure 7) to facilitate assigning rights to shares (Figure 8). As you create users, the EDR automatically creates “private” directories. Unfortunately, there’s no option for setting disk quotas on users. The EDR supports either local user authentication, or can integrate into an Active Directory environment.

Figure 7: Assigning users to groups

Figure 8: Assigning rights to users for a shared folder