Operation (continued):
The primary means of configuring the N3200 is through a web interface. The image below shows the login screen presented when you enter the device's IP address into your web browser's address bar.
The status screen is shown in the below left image, where information is provided regarding manufacturer, model, firmware version, and device up time. The below right image shows the RAID configuration screen, where it can be seen that the three Maxtor drives are about to be configured in a RAID 5 array with a 64KB stripe size. Once "Create" was clicked the interface monitored the construction of the RAID array. Especially since the drives were empty to begin with, I was a bit surprised that it took well over an hour to create the array.
The next set of images provide some screenshots to show the options in the N3200's menu. Navigating through these drop downs will provide access to anything the device can do, from setting up network shares, to connecting to external (USB and eSATA) storage, to configuring HTTP and FTP access. One thing I noticed that was rather odd is that with the initial configuration, the webcam and print server features were not available. The firmware installed had the same revision number as the latest available online, but when I decided to update the firmware to what seemed to be the same version, all of a sudden the webcam and print options became avaailable on the far left drop down. Not sure how to explain that one.
Continuing the look around the menus we see the options in the network and system drop downs.
The images below show the RAID 5 array in its complete and healthy status. Switching to another configuration requires that you click to "remove" the existing array first, and it is then just a matter of a few clicks to have the drives setup in a different manner.
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