5. More Security & Volume Management

Clicking on any of the service icons exposes the Share Options tab (Figure 10) that contains tabs with controls for each of the services.

Figure 10: Share Options exposed
(click image to enlarge)

Note that you can separately restrict read and write access to specific hosts, which can be entered as comma-delimited lists of IP addresses or valid DNS names (24 characters maximum). You can also enter a range of hosts using common IP range expressions such as 192.168.2., 192.168.2.0/255.255.255.0 or 192.168.2.0/24 to specify IP addresses 192.168.2.1 through 192.168.2.254.

If you scroll down the CIFS tab, you'll find even more stuff like the ability to enable a Recycle Bin and the Advanced permissions shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11: Advanced CIFS Share Permissions
(click image to enlarge)

Note that the Advanced settings allow you to tweak file and folder permissions - something I don't usually see in consumer NAS devices. Unless you're experienced with setting these types of permissions, you'd best leave these controls alone, since you can end up making files and folders inaccessible to their rightful owners!

Infrant believes strongly in the robustness of RAID, so ships diskful ReadyNASes configured for RAID 5 with a default configuration resulting in a single volume of around 650 GB for a "1 TB" model. For the ReadyNAS 600, you can change this by deleting the volume and using the Shares > Add Volume tab that appears after the volume is deleted (Figure 11).

Figure 11: Add Volume
(click image to enlarge)

A couple items of note here are the Hot Spare and Space reserved for snapshots controls. The Infrant User Guide explains that a Hot Spare remains in standby mode and will automatically regenerate the data from a failed disk from the volume. A hot spare disk is only available for RAID level 1 and RAID level 5 if there are enough disks to fulfill the required minimum plus one.

A snapshot can be thought of as a frozen image of a volume at the time of the snapshot, and can be scheduled on selected days, and during selected time periods every 2, 4, 8, 12 or 24 hours. Snapshots are typically used for backups during which time the original volume can continue to operate normally. They also can be used as temporary backups, to allow quick recovery from virus infections or accidentally deleted or damaged files. Snapshot shares can be browsed just like normal shares, except they are read-only.

Infrant apparently believes so strongly in RAID that they don't make it easy to configure a ReadyNAS 600 in JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) mode. I found that you can set each drive as a separate volume, by setting one disk at a time to RAID 0 and applying the settings. It takes a few minutes before the ReadyNAS becomes available again each time you do this, so getting to a JBOD configuration is a bit tedious.

The good news about volume reconfiguration is that, in all but a few cases, the volume building or "syncing" process takes place in the background while the volume is available for use! This is a good thing because when I reset both the X6 and 600 to factory defaults, the volume sync process took about five hours. I was even able to shut down the systems for the night in the middle of the volume rebuild and have them pick up where it left off when I powered up the systems the next morning. This is definitely better than the volume reconfiguration process on the Buffalo Terastation, which doesn't allow interruption or use of the drive while the reconfiguration is running.

If all the volume creation choices make your head hurt, then the X6 is the way to go. It makes all the choices for you, automatically adjusting RAID levels and the size of the single volume it creates according to the number of drives loaded into the system. You still get snapshot capability with the X6, but lose the hot spare feature.