Installation
Installing the drives was trivial-a simple matter of extracting the cages, screwing in the drives, and replacing the cages back into the unit. Once I booted the device, the LCD prompted me to initialize it by selecting a drive configuration (RAID0/5/6, JBOD, single), and choosing if I wanted encryption on the created volumes.
Knowing that I was simply going to replace the firmware on the DOM (version 2.1) with the recently released 3.1 firmware, I chose single drives and no encryption. After approximately five minutes, the unit was ready to go and accessible through the web-based interface on port 8080.
I logged in, noting the standard, ugly QNAP web-based administration panel which has plagued the device since its early days. Being a former TS-109 Pro and current TS-409 Pro user, I’m quite familiar with the panel and quickly found the System Upgrade section. I downloaded the 3.1 firmware-supposedly with a new GUI-and upgraded the unit.
The LCD is more useful during setup than during normal operation. The device can be setup using solely the LCD, select, and enter buttons. During normal operation, select switches between a display of the unit’s firmware version and model name, and the unit’s hostname and IP address. It’s enough information to get to the unit’s administration panel.
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