Noontec TerraMaster F2-220 2-Bay SMB Cloud Storage NAS Review

Setup – Users, Groups & Shares

We got a basic working NAS running, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t continue our setup and make more changes. One of the first places we’ll want to visit is the Control Panel and the privilege panel which holds our users, groups, and shared folder options.

Users

You can create nearly endless users with the only limitation being how many people you’ll want to have access to the NAS. It’s generally a great idea to make separate users for everyone that needs to use the NAS instead of letting multiple users share an account.

Creating a new user is a breeze. The only information you need to provide is a name and a password for it. You can optionally enable SSH login and TNAS remote login for the user too.

Sometimes you’ll want to limit users and some people have the tendency to abuse available storage. You wouldn’t want someone to fill up your NAS and not leave the space you need yourself.

Assign the user to an existing group. We will create more groups as the next step and we can also add users to the groups later – so you can skip this step for now if you like me haven’t made any groups yet.

You can assign individual rights to each existing shared folder too. Much like with groups, this can be changed later and when you create new shares, you can add user rights during that step too.

User Groups

User groups are a great way to keep the setup simple and assign access rights to a whole lot of people at once instead of having to micro-manage every single user.

The steps are much like before when we created new users with the exception that we don’t need a password.

Existing users can be easily be added to the group by selecting those you want to add.

Shared Folders

Users are one thing, but those users also need something to gain access to and that’s the shared folders. We can create more or less as many as we want and name them how we’d like. There are a few default folders created by the system too, such as the public folder and the ones for USB connected storage drives.

Creating new shares is a piece of pie. Enter a name and an optional description while selecting the volume to add it on.

Access to the new folder can be set to full access for everyone (public), by defined user, or by groups.

Should we ever accidentally delete a default folder, then the advanced function can help os recreate them.

We can also mount ISO drives as shared folders which are great if you store ISOs of your software library on your NAS.