Usage Continued
The TS-809 Pro supports a variety of hard drive volume types: single, JBOD, and RAID0/1/5/6. Most users will want RAID5 or RAID6, the former providing much of the speed benefit of RAID0 while allowing for a single drive failure. The latter provides the same, but allows for two drive failures. The user can manage the volumes individually and also check out each physical drive’s SMART statistics and drive health sensors. The volumes can also be fully encrypted.
A really neat feature of the TS-809 is that it can act as an iSCSI target as well as mount other iSCSI drives. These can be used to build a healthy-size Storage Area Network. This feature is probably overkill for home users and even small business, but medium and larger business can surely benefit from it. Check out Wikipedia for more information on iSCSI.
User and share management hasn’t changed a whole lot, but it’s certainly cleaner than the old interface!
SMB networking with ActiveDirectory support is included, as well as AFP, NFS, FTP, and SFTP-yes, tried and true SFTP, added in the 2.x series, probably after I complained about the lack of it in the TS-409U review. SNMP is also there for the watchdog administrator.
There is a web server with PHP and a MySQL database server on the device, as well.
Various services include UPnP and Bonjour device discovery and advertising, web file manager, download manager, and surveillance station. UPnP media for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are there, as is DAAP for iTunes sharing.
QPKG is a system which allows the user to install various add-on packages such as Joomla!, WordPress, and more. It would be nice if these could be one-click installed rather than having to be separately downloaded.
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