Silverstone DC01 Data Center Network your data easily

Author: Jouni 'Jipa' Vasama Published: 22.02.2012 Manufacturer: Silverstonetek Product Group: Storage In English Suomeksi

 

In use

 

 

After installing the hard drive and getting the DC01 all wired up it's time to boot it up for the first time. After logging in it first offered to automatically update its firmware and after that format the hard drive automatically. If you decide to do the formatting by hand, remember to add a swap-partition required by the embedded Linux.

 

 

After that we finally get to see the actual user interface, and if the casing alone wasn't Mac-ish enough, then here's some more! In this screenshot I'm logged in as admin and get to change the settings of the device and all its services. In this screenshot you can see that the UI really supports multiple windows and is far more graphical than anything we've seen before.

 

 

For full listing of the software features available please refer to Silverstone's product page: http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=290&area=en

On the top row one can view server info, set the name of the device, view system logs (also includes the logs for iTunes-, Download- and Media Server services), back up and restore the device configuration and finally set up DDNS-service with the option of multiple host names.

The second row is dedicated to the various services the DC01 offers. Each of these services can be enabled or disabled to your liking, and they also pack the necessary settings to get the most out of them.

The second to last row has settings for the Email, Downloader and iBackup. From these the Email offers the usual SMTP-server setup, Downloader has settings for maximum download and upload rates and number of connections and downloads and iBackup has the ON/OFF toggle and choice of backup folder.

On the last row there's a rather simplified Accounts-control where the admin can add or remove accounts, settings for the network setup, UPnP port-setting, another window for setting the time zone and date and finally Power Management where one can set the time before disk standby in minutes. From Shut Down the setup can either be shut down or restarted at will.

Overall the DC01 is pretty easy to manage, but I think it would be a great feature there were clear signs next to each logo stating whether the service is in use or not.

 

 

Users can also change the looks of the user interface by choosing the dock size and position and even the background. While these features may not be the most important aspect of the DC01, it's still impressive to see just what can be done with such hardware.

 

 

The biggest inconvenience about the DC01 is definitely the way it requires browser plugins to play media files. In the worst case scenario you'll end up downloading Quicktime, Windows Mediaplayer and Realplayer plug-ins, which is NOT something I'd like to do. Flash plug-in is enough to play mp3 and flv, but for everything else you'll need to download one of the other plug-ins.

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