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The Experience

Hardware aside the real meat of the Silverstone DC01 comes from its sophisticated UI and features or more simply put, its “apps.” There are a number of ways to access the device from the complex traditional style of access like NFS and FTP, through more modern network sharing principles like AFS, SMB and Samba all the way up to HTML and DLNA access.

The DC01 runs on Linux specifically Linux version 2.6.31.6-fast-20110114 (20110114 is the firmware version used on the NAS) The boot log also informs us this is OXSEMI NAS device (which is Oxford Semiconductors and was purchased by PLX 3 years ago). Whether Oxsemi uploader will work on the device is unknown. A skilled NIX operator should be able to add and remove packages from the OS as they see fit using SSH.

Standard NAS devices will show up in your Network, therefore so does the DC01. The default name is “ISHARING” but this like most everything else can be changed once logged into the UI. Opening up iharing network storage gives access to storage folders once a drive has been installed and mounted. (Windows users may not be familiar with mounting a drive, but it is a very simple process and doing so in the UI is a simple 2-3 click process and is non-destructive).

The meat and potatoes of the sharing experience comes from the integrated OS with a full blown Desktop Experience User Interface. This really needs little description as it will be familiar to anyone that is running a computer.

There are 3 methods of logging into the UI. One can use the isharing finder application available for download at silverstonetek.com which opens a browser window with the local IP address used as the URL. The finder application is not necessary if you already know the IP address of the device simply type that into your browser and you will be redirected to the login screen. (A static IP can be set for the NAS once logged in so finding the IP address in the future will not be an issue). Lastly, reading the MAC address for the device navigate to myakitio.com type in the MAC address in the field (select remember me to avoid having to type it in the future) and then you will be redirected to the login page for the DC01.

Browsing files from within the UI is quite simple. Bear in mind however this is still only a NAS device and not a high powered desktop so thumbnails will not appear right away. Uploading forty 12 MP digital images of the drive itself was simple and fast. Waiting for thumbnails to appear however takes a long time and was not worth waiting for.

The DC01 adds bittorrent download capability without the need to have a PC running. The first attempt to download a torrent file worked very easily, just click add then select the torrent file from your PC and it will start downloading automatically. You have to enable the download service before bitorrent will function and where you set it you can manipulate maximum connections upload and download speeds. No max seeding time however. The downloaded files will be in your downloads/torrent folder in your network share. There however is no way to save .torrent files to network share and then start them through the UI. Replacing this with a custom torrent app might be something a linux modder would want to do.

There is a built in media player for streaming Audio and Video files. This worked very well in testing, music streamed flawlessly through the browser. My converted Clone Wars recorded episodes streamed well even over an Internet connection although it opened Windows Media Player and did not play directly in the browser.

The Social network feature will read your browsers cookies for Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. This makes uploading files to any of these services simple and doable straight from your Network Data Center.

DDNS is not the included feature run through myakitio but for those that have a DYNDNS account they can enter the details and access the device over the Internet with a simple to remember URL like myhomeserver.dyndns.org

The AFP, NFS, FTP and iTunes services were not tested as no Apple, Unix or iTunes is operated by this reviewer. NFS works with Linux also but Windows will not support it without Unix services for Windows.

Even with every “window” open that we could find the DC01 performed very well. Tasks still performed as expected so 256 MB of RAM is adequate for this product. “But wait there’s more!” Users that tend to have multiple windows open can easy find which window they want by clicking a button on the system bar at the top of the page. All pages get displayed in a simple popup.

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