Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 NAS Device

Having no defined users yet (other than the admin) and just two shares--which have public access--is not the safest, nor most efficient use of the device; therefore you will likely want to create users, groups, and some private folder shares. When you create a user, you have the option of assigning administrator rights to the user, adding the user to existing groups, and creating a private share for the user.

User administration.		Groups administration.

When you create a folder share, you assign an existing user as the owner of the share, select which of the available services the share supports (CIFS, FTP, and NFS), choose whether to enable the Recycle Bin Service, and whether to enable the Drag&Sort Service. After creating a share, you are given the option to also set up the folder share permissions.

Shares administration.		Recycle-Bin.

Contrary to similarity of the name of the 440's Recycle-Bin Service to the Windows Recycle Bin, enabling this does not create a Windows File Manager-accessible Recycle Bin. Instead, what this service does is create a special folder on the device where deleted files are placed; but the folder can only be seen and accessed via the browser-based BlackArmor Manager tool. You retrieve deleted files by selecting them from the appropriate Recycle Bin Share; undeleted files are placed back into the folder share from where they were originally deleted from. By default, the Recycle-Bin Service will hold onto deleted files for 3 days and use up to 10-percent of the volume's available storage; but these setting can be changed.

Enabling the Drag&Sort Service for a share.

When Drag&Sort is enabled for a folder share, all recognized music, photos, and video files that are copied to that share or its subfolders are automatically moved to either a My Music, My Pictures, or My Videos folder within that share (the folder is automatically created if it doesn't exist). We understand the concept of consolidating media types to relevant folders, but we feel that the 440's implementation misses the boat for several reasons.

Media folders automatically created for a pubic share (left) and a private share (right).

For starters, other than for the Public folder share, these consolidated media folders are not indexed by the 440's DLNA or iTunes severs, so the contents of these folders are not available for streaming. Secondly, while recognized files are moved, unrecognized media files and the existing folders are not--so you can potentially wind up with a bunch of empty folders (with subfolders) in your folder share. But perhaps our biggest fault with Drag&Sort is that it puts all moved media into the relevant media folder (i.e., Our Music if it is a public share, My Music if it is a private share), without maintaining the original folder structure.

Drag&Sort dumps all the music files into a single folder.

While you music library might initially be neatly organized into separate folders for artists, with subfolders for each album, that organization gets thrown out the window with Drag&Sort and you wind up with a My Music folder with a seemingly endless collection of possibly indecipherable file names. If a filename already exists, the newly moved file gets a number appended to its name, such as Summertime_1.mp3. For these reasons, we would not enable the Drag&Sort feature for our own use. The problem is, however, that even with Drag&Sort disabled for a folder, it's still possible to unintentionally sort the media for a share on the Storage/Share page of the BlackArmor Manager Tool with an small button that is very easy to accidentally press. We would have liked to see the ability to completely disable this feature.