3. Initial Setup

Since the WL-HDD comes without a 2.5 inch drive, you'll need to get one and install it yourself. ASUS was kind enough to save me the hassle of finding a drive and supplied the Hitachi HTS548080M9AT00 Travelstar 80G 5400RPM drive you see in Figures 4 and 5.

ASUS has made the drive installation very easy, even eliminating the need to remove screws to open the case as described in the User Manual. All you do is pull the rear panel that is attached to the board out of the case, carefully line up the drive and WL-HDD connectors, seat the drive, then slide the case back over the board until it closes with a nice, reassuring click.

Figure 4: Board top before drive install
(click image to enlarge)

You can see in Figure 4 that ASUS has provided noise-isolation pads for the drive to sit on and plenty of room for you to ease the drive into place. The trickiest part of the install was making sure that I had the connectors lined up properly. Figure 5 shows the board with drive nestled into place and ready to be slipped back into the case.

Figure 5: Drive installed
(click image to enlarge)

With the drive install out of the way, it's time to power it up. There's no power switch - you just plug in the power wart. You can shut it down via the shutdown / reset-to-factory defaults button, which takes some getting used to due to unclear instructions regarding its use in the PDF User Manual. You can also shut the WL-HDD via the web interface, but this also is a little quirky for reasons I'll get to shortly. Note that power-up after shut down must be done by unplugging the power adapter and plugging it back in. This whole sequence is not intuitive and I hope ASUS rethinks it in future firmware.

The WL-HDD's defaults do their best to get you connected to an existing network. The Ethernet interface is set to look for a DHCP server to grab an IP address from and, failing that, defaults to a static IP of 192.168.1.220. The wireless side is similarly set to AP client mode and tries to find an AP to associate with. If it doesn't find one, it switches over to AP mode with an SSID of WL-HDD.

While the WL-HDD's automatic network connection methods are nice, at some point you'll need to connect to the web interface to complete your setup, which means determining the IP address the box ended up with. If you have a Windows machine handy you can run the utility that ASUS supplies, which lets you scan for drives and connect to do some simple configuration. Alternatively, if you have a UPnP-aware flavor of Windows (that's properly configured) you may see the drive's UPnP icon pop up in the System Tray and access it that way. Alternatively, you can look for its UPnP icon (named ASUS Wireless Harddisk Drive) in My Network Places.

At any rate, once you get the correct IP address in your browser's URL box, the next kink you may encounter comes if your browser blocks pop-ups and you have firmware earlier than 1.1.2 8. The earlier ASUS firmware relied on popping up a small window from which you could select the main activities that you wanted to perform (Figure 6)

Figure 6: Main navigation pop-up window

Clicking on any of these links spawns yet another browser window where the real work is done - making a total of three browser windows just to get down to business. Given the growing number of pop-up blocking browsers and browser tools, ASUS re-thought this approach and in the 1.1.2.8 firmware changed the behavior to not rely on the first pop-up window. This is a much-better approach, but since the only place that the software Shutdown button appears is on that now blocked window, ASUS still has some interface tweaking to do.

As with other ASUS wireless products, the interface is generally responsive, but saving changes takes some getting used to. The Save button on each page doesn't really put your changes into effect - you need to click the Finish button for that. Once you click Finish, applying changes requires a 30 second-or-so reboot, but at least the browser automatically refreshes when the WL-HDD is back up. ASUS has improved the interface so that it now prompts you to click Finish after certain functions, but I'd still rather see making changes not require such a long wait.