4. Advanced Features

Digging deeper into the menus revealed some advanced functionality that didn't appear to be advertised anywhere on SimpleTech's web site or product brochures. I found menus for creating encrypted, mirrored and striped shares, which are RAID capabilities that I have not seen in other boxes of the same class. Selecting the Help button on this screen brought up a full help listing for all features of the box, including these advanced ones. Reading through the help menus indicated that the mirror and striping capabilities are designed to be used on external drives plugged into the box.

A mirrored pool (RAID 1) is designed to be an exact copy of a pool. The feature allows one or more mirrors to be defined, and the box can switch over to the mirror pool if the main pool dies (Figure 4). The striping feature (RAID 0) spreads data across multiple external disks for performance reasons. Unfortunately, the only external USB drive I had during this testing was on its last legs and wouldn't reliably spin up, so I couldn't test these features. But they obviously could be very useful for advanced users.

Figure 4: Setting up a mirror

The one thing that my bad external enclosure did allow me to do was test failure notification. When I plugged in the bad enclosure, I received an e-mail telling me that I had plugged in a "broken" disk. Along the lines of "broken" disks, there was also a screen for running SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) tests on the drive. This industry-standard test allows you to check out the health and status of your drive and perhaps back it up if it appears to be going south. It's a nice feature that could save you a lot of grief.

Even though I couldn't use the mirror or striping features, I could try out encryption, which works without requiring external drives. For testing encryption, I wanted to split the predefined pool in half so that I could have one encrypted pool and one normal one. To do this, I used the handy Resize Pool menu under Disk Management. This screen (Figure 5) gave me a nice little slider where I could change the size of an existing pool.

Figure 5: Changing the pool size
(click on image to enlarge)

Once I had two pools, I went into the main disk management screen and selected the option to encrypt the pool. This presented me with a password screen where I entered the encryption password twice. When I selected the button to start the encryption, I was greeted with a success pop-up a few seconds later and redirected back to the main screen. But the status of my share now showed "Encrypting" (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Encrypting a pool
(click on image to enlarge)

At this point, I assumed that the encryption was going on in the background and I continued to explore. But after leaving it overnight, I noticed that the status was still showing Encrypting - surely it wouldn't take this long! So I tried to turn the encryption off, but was notified that I needed to wait until the encryption was done. I was stuck. The only thing I could do was to delete and re-create the pool. Once I did this, I retraced my steps and successfully encrypted the pool. This time the status changed almost immediately to "Good" (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Good pool status
(click on image to enlarge)