- Introduction
- Hooking Up the D-Link DNS-120
- Software Configuration
- Using Your Drive Across the Network
- Some Finer-Grained Security
- Conclusion
Using Your Drive Across the Network
At this point, you can use the USB drive you connected to the network storage adapter; simply address the drive by the network drive letter you assigned. You can see the drive letter assignment in Windows Explorer. After double-clicking My Computer, look in the Network Drives section, as shown in Figure 9.
Figure 9 Viewing the networked USB drive in Windows Explorer.
You can use the networked drive basically as if it were a local drive. The only exception is if the drive is formatted as NTFS, in which case the network storage adapter treats the drive as a read-only device. In short, you can't make changes to the files on the drive. If you plan to use USB hard drives for network storage, make sure that they're formatted using FAT32.
By default, the network storage adapter assumes that computers accessing the drive are part of the Windows workgroup named "workgroup." You can change this setting in the DNS-120 web administrative console, which you access by pointing your browser to the address delegated to the network storage adapter (by default, 192.168.0.101). Click the Device button in the left panel and change the workgroup name in the right panel to the desired name, as shown in Figure 10. After changing the workgroup name, click the Apply button to make the changes take effect.
Figure 10 Changing the default workgroup.