Page 3 - Configuration and User Interface
To gain access to your SilverStone DC01, open up a browser of your choice, and head over to myakitio.com to find your SilverStone DC01. You can also do this via LAN using the finder software, available from the DC01's downloads page. You will be presented with a fancy little screen like the first screenshot shown above. This is where your MAC address comes in handy. Enter it here and continue. You will not need to check off the "Remember me" box, unless you decide not to change the name of your DC01 later on. This will take you to the login page. If you are wondering what your credentials are, they are provided in your manual. If you already lost that, the default username and password should both be "admin".
With everything entered and logged in, you will be greeted with a very Mac "inspired" interface, with a dock at the bottom and some icons on the desktop. I will go into more detail about those in just a moment. The taskbar at the top is relatively simple, so I will leave it to you to figure out what they do, and not waste too much of your time. But before we move on, you will need to get your hard drive formatted, running, and mounted before actually using your SilverStone DC01. The Disk Manager shown in the screenshot above is relatively straightforward. Once formatted, your drive will need to be mounted as what they call a 'home drive'; that drive will now be the primary drive. Once that procedure is completed, give your DC01 a quick reboot. If you ever decided to change up your drive arrangement, you can easily bring up this menu again with the Disk Manager shortcut, which is the second icon from the right on the dock.
To start configuring the rest of your SilverStone DC01, click on the gear-like icon on the far right on the dock. This will bring up the System Preferences window, and you will have access to the many system software features. While I won't be going through all of them in detail, I will go through the main ones to get you started off with the basic features. Many of these software features are relatively easy to play around with, so I will not be going through every single menu item for the sake of time. As a quick note before you continue, the dock features My Server, Album, Media Player, Address Book, Social Network, Downloader, Disk Manager, and Preferences. The Media Player function allows you to play stored media files through your web browser, so you can stream music to any system with Flash support. Other than that, all its names correspond to the function, so I am pretty sure you will know what is going on without me explaining what it is and what it does, haha.
To simplify things, if you chose not to memorize your MAC address, quickly head over to the Registration menu and simply enter a name that you can easily remember. The next time you access your DC01, it will be in the form of http://YourServerName.myakitio.com/, where YourServerName is the name that you have entered. Give it another reboot and access your NAS again. If you grow tired of constantly rebooting, consider setting up all your other features first, and a single reboot should be more than enough to get it settled in. A reboot should take no more than a couple minutes, but hey -- no one likes to wait, right?
Streaming and sharing files is quick to initiate. Simply create user account names for your friends and family with a preset password. One thing that I did not particularly like is that normal users cannot change their password after they log in. How I view this is although you are the system administrator, it seems like you will need to make an agreement with your buddies that their password will not be shared.
If you decide to map a drive, here is where you would choose a name. This is a useful feature when managing files within your network -- to be able to easily access files and folders within your preferred environment. Simply set a name, and when you go to map the drive, it will be in the form of \\YourServerName\admin. I think the biggest problem with SilverStone's DC01 is that it is not really designed with Windows' network drive mapping in mind, so it can be quite a headache to setup initially. Additionally, you cannot restrict users to folders, because everything on your shared folder does not require authentication. I don't think having such a feature is too much to ask for, but from the software we have right now, all this means is the SilverStone DC01 is a NAS more intended for home networks with a lot of trust between its users.
All in all, it is undeniable the SilverStone DC01 has a very nice web interface. However, the learning curve is somewhat steep for the relatively small amount of features it has; sometimes it can even be a headache to get certain features working for the very first time. Its lack of user account control and network folder permissions configuration for Windows network drive mapping really limits the system's practical usability on a larger home network. There is definitely room for improvement in this area.
Page Index
1. Introduction and Specifications
2. A Closer Look - Hardware
3. Configuration and User Interface
4. Performance and Power Consumption
5. Final Thoughts and Conclusion
