SmallNetBuilder

Share Management

Of course, the main purpose of a NAS is to share data on the network. Figure 10 shows the Share setup menu.

Figure 10: TS-S402 Share Setup

Options are provided for specifying the share name, disk used, and protocols allowed to access the share. The disk specification did not include USB disks, which automatically get shared.

My tests of the share creation capability showed it worked as designed, but as noted previously, it was up to be to figure out the path to the share for NFS usage. And as I've seen before, NFS usage under OSX can be a bit of a pain because most NFS servers don't like using the high ports that OSX calls for.

You can also see a choice of "Private" or "Anonymous" for the share. When "Private" is selected, you are given the choice of which users are allowed to access the specified share. For creating users, a basic menu is provide as shown in Figure 11

Figure 11: TS-S402 User Creation

I found it interesting that an error was thrown if I used a password greater than 8 characters on this menu. Note that the S402 provides no group capability for classifying sets of users together.

Backup

NASes are often used for network backup of other devices. So many manufacturers supply client software to back up data to the NAS. But Trendnet doesn't bundle any client backup software. But it does provide the ability to back up one share to another on the device. Figure 12 shows the menu that allows users to schedule these backups.

Figure 12: TS-S402 Backup menu

Note the extensive options for specifying when the backups should occur. It was interesting that neither the source nor the destination folder could be an external USB or networked drive, which would seem to be an obvious choice.

My tests of this capability showed it worked, although when I set it to back up every hour, the backups didn't seem to occur that often.

Disk Management

Trendnet provides a number of capabilities for managing the disks in your S402. Figure 13 shows a Status menu displaying various information regarding the disks installed. The "Health Test Result" menu seems to imply the presence of SMART diagnostics.

Figure 13: TS-S402 Disk Info

I didn't find any method to set the spin-down time for the drives in any of the menus. In my house, most of the time my NAS devices are idle. So it's nice to have a method to tell them to spin down, reducing both power and noise.