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Exactly how
you configure your
Disk Station will of course be totally up to you. However, I will
demonstrate how I configured it and the chances are good that you'll be doing it
pretty much the same way. Getting started, obviously the Disk Station will
require power. Once that's done, run a CAT-5 cable from the Disk Station to an
open port on your router. In some cases, like mine, there are not enough
physical ports on a router to handle all of the connections you'll want. To
overcome this you'll need to expand your router, and YES you can do this without
buying another router. Simply run another CAT-5 cable to separate network switch. Most modern
switches have a feature call "Auto-MDI/MDI-X" that eliminated the need for a
special "UPLINK" port. In this way, you can expand your router to handle as many
physical connections as you need.
Since just about every router is defaulted to act as a
Dynamic Headway Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server, we will let the router
handle the task of giving the Disk Station its Internet Protocol (IP) address
for your LAN. The DHCP server in a typical router can handle up to 255
logical connection, counting the router itself as one. So every physical
connection that is made to the router will also be logically administered by the
router. Even if you have to connect your router to another Ethernet switch, it
is still connected to the same physical network and the router will see
each of the connections made.
While the Disk Station is powering up,
this is a good time to install the Synology Assistant on a PC. This software comes in
both MAC and Windows versions. I installed the Assistant on a Windows XP SP2 and
a Windows Vista (32-bit) desktop. I'm happy to report the software worked flawlessly on both operating
systems. So, once the Assistant is installed and running, it will search your
LAN for a Disk Station. If the Disk Station has finished booting (you should see
a solid blue power light when it has) then something similar to the above screen
shot is what you should see. If you have more than one Disk Station on your
network, then you will see each of them, and you'll have to select the one you
want to administer before moving on.
You'll know you're doing everything right
when you get to the login screen. Since there is no password set up for any of
the services yet, you can just click the Enter button to gain access to the Disk
Station's Management menu.
There is more than one setting you could
start with to get the Disk Station ready to go. However, since it is primarily a
storage device, I opted to start by building the volume set. The Disk Station
uses Redundant Array of Independent Drives (RAID) technology as the foundation
for volume creation. You must choose which type of volume to create during
setup. Yes, you can go back and change it later, but that also means that any
data on the NAS will be deleted. The choices are RAID-0 and RAID-1, depending on
whether you want maximum performance or protection against a single drive fail
respectively. While we've had numerous articles hat talk about RAID technology,
feel free to view
this page at The Wikipedia for
a quick refresher.
Actually building the RAID array
could take quite a bit of time depending on how large the disks are, and the
type of RAID you chose. RAID-1 volumes definitely took longer to build, but they
also provide a reasonable amount of data security. Once the RAID volume is
built, the last step for basic volume creation is
going to be setting up your shared folders. Here I have created two folders
named Music and TEST. You can impose all sorts of additional security features
such as the one you see at the bottom of the menu. Putting a checkmark there
will cause the folder you selected to be hidden from the My Network Places
window. Among other features, you can also impose restrictions based on user
names to further restrict and protect your data.
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