6. USB Drives & Print Serving

The ReadyNAS has better support than Buffalo's Terastation for both USB Flash and hard drives formatted with FAT32, NTFS, EXT2 or EXT3. Figure 12 shows the results from my insertion of a Flash drive I had lying around. Note that the drive is identified as having a FAT16 file system, which seems to contradict Infrant's FAT32 formatting requirement.

Figure 12: USB Storage
(click image to enlarge)

The option at the bottom of Figure 12 allows automatic copying of a Flash key's contents to a specified share and folder upon insertion into the ReadyNAS. Each Flash device is automatically made available as a separate share with the same permissions and services as the native ReadyNAS shares. Of course, you can tweak each service's settings by clicking on its icon.

I didn't try attaching a USB hard drive, but expect that it would work just as well. Infrant says that if you attach USB drives with multiple partitions, all the partitions will be made available for browsing, but I didn't confirm this. I did try attaching a USB 2.0 hub, both to make ports more conveniently accessible and to see if more than two drives would be recognized. Figure 13 tells the tale.

Figure 13: Three Flashes via a USB hub
(click image to enlarge)

I gave the USB print server a quick try with an Epson Stylus C80 printer. The ReadyNAS picked up the printer attachment within a few seconds and I was able to find the shared printer with my XP Pro SP2 machine using My Network Places and execute a standard Windows printer installation. (Infrant says the print server supports only "Windows printing".)

Figure 14: Print job in progress
(click image to enlarge)

Starting a print job was reflected in Shares > USB > USB Printers tab (Figure 14). But when I killed the print job using the checkbox provided, the job eventually stopped, but the page wasn't ejected from the printer.

By the way, I connected the printer to the USB hub I installed earlier, so I had a total of two flash drives and one printer simultaneously connected. But when I checked the USB Storage tab with the printer connected, only one drive was shown. I'm not sure this was due to the printer connection, because even when I disconnected the printer, the other flash drives did not reappear.