Moving back to the main menu, I found an option designed to back up the SSII's internal shares to a properly formatted (ext3) external USB drive (Figure 8). However, I didn't have a spare, empty drive to try it out with. I did find, however, that the Fat32 formatted drives I plugged in were automatically shared. I'll note that the external drive I used was partitioned into four parts and all four were all properly exported. This is in contrast to every other NAS device I've tested that just exported the first partition.

Figure 8: Shared Folder Backup

The external USB ports can also be used to share a USB printer. Of course, any computer that wants to use the printer will need to have the driver installed.

Other items found under the "Advanced" menu included Network Time Protocol server controls (Figure 9), changing the admin page language and network settings. Another feature that I'm always interested in lay under "Power Management". This capability is supposed to allow the disk to spin down after a specified period of inactivity, but I couldn't get it to work.

Figure 9: Time Setup

For the internal drive, the options were always greyed out and unselectable. For the external drive, I could make a selection, but would get an error when I tried to apply it.

A "USB" submenu under the advanced options allowed formatting USB drives, disabling the USB printer, etc. There was also a "System Maintenance" menu that among other things, allowed diagnostic operations on the disk. But each time I tried to run the test, I'd end up with an inconclusive result (Figure 10).

Figure 10: Diagnostics results