Installation

Installation is is pretty straight forward, screw the HDDs on top of the caddies and slide them in. This can be done while the machine is on as the disks are hot swappable.


Unlike some higher end models the N2200 requires a Windows based utility to be installed. This is because the firmware is stored on the hard drive(s) and gets copied by the utility. The downside is that you can't just replace the harddrives, on the plus side you can recover from a broken firmware easily.



When the configuration utility is done you can manage the N2200 via a webinterface. The webinterface recently got a nice upgrade and utilizes AJAX. It looks very modern though can be a bit sluggish at times. Many pages require a few seconds to read their information before they show. When going back to a previously viewed page the info is not cached.


Basic settings like the system time and user accounts can easily be changed and backed up to a file. The firmware can also be upgraded via the web interface, so ideally you should not require the configuration utility ever again.


The system network tab does not only contain the network settings but also the settings of all network services. You can enable or disable each and set various settings. Few advanced options are shown, keeping things understandable for normal users.


The storage tab contains settings for the disks and their RAID level. Unfortunately there are no migration options, so if you have a single disk and want a RAID 1 array later on you're out of luck.


As with previous models, you can customize the N2200 using modules. Though due to the limited processing power of the N2200 I can imagine this having a limit. The one module I'd love to have would be SSH, unfortunately this is not available.