Iomega's StorCenter

Iomega offers a US$209 single-drive shared storage device similar to that offered by Buffalo, but I opted to test the US$439.95 dual-drive configuration, which allows mirroring on two internal 250GB disk drives for disaster recovery. Both drives are SATA with 3Gbit/sec throughput. That's a very nice feature to have, but it also adds about US$200 to the cost while cutting available storage space by half.

Iomega's 500GB StorCenter is a shorter (just under 5 in. tall), wider (just over 3 in.), more compact unit that's less likely to get knocked over than other models I tested. The single-disk, 250GB model can't be mirrored, but a four-disk, 1TB unit supports a fault-tolerant, RAID 5 configuration. The StorCenter was the only unit I tested that uses a parallel ATA disk interface rather than the newer, serial ATA standard, which offers faster transfer rates. In daily use, however, the unit was not noticeably slower than the other units.

The 500GB model can be configured to stripe data across the two disks (RAID 0), ostensibly to increase performance. RAID 0 is the default. Alternately, the system can make both drives appear as a single volume, filling up first one disk, then the other. Performance-wise, most users probably won't notice a difference either way. But if pieces of every file are stored on both drives, all files could become corrupted when one drive fails in a RAID 0 configuration. By contrast, with drive spanning only the files stored on the failed drive would be lost. Given that, my preference would be to opt for drive spanning or mirroring. I chose the latter.

Setting up mirroring requires reformatting the drive, a process that takes a few hours. Once set up, mirroring was transparent and worked seamlessly.

Like most NAS devices, the StorCenter appears on the network as a Microsoft Windows Network resource that can be located and mapped as a drive letter in Windows Explorer. Iomega includes a discovery and device configuration tool that automates that process. While the installation software puts a shortcut to the discovery software on the desktop, it doesn't place a shortcut to the StorCenter shared disk there.

The StorCenter's firmware-based configuration utility is accessible from a browser. It enables basic device configuration as well as features such as FTP services and shared printing. The configuration utility can be password-protected, and you can create password-protected user accounts and restrict access to shared folders by user. Users have either full or no access. Another nice feature: shared folders can be configured with a space quota. No other model did that.

Iomega's StorCenter also can be configured as a media server, which enables multimedia streaming to home entertainment systems equipped with a UPNP-compatible digital media adapter. I did not test this feature, however.

While you can set up access to a shared folder via FTP, the function's usefulness is limited. Access is via anonymous FTP with no password, although you can configure the shared folder to restrict activity to downloads, uploads or both. As with the other products, documentation on this feature is sparse, and the user is left to figure out how to successfully map to the device through his firewall.

Finding the information on how to set up a network printer connection is tricky as well. The configuration utility says to run the discovery tool and click on "Connect to Network Printer" to install the driver. In the version of the discovery tool I tested no such option existed. An "About network printing" option located there takes the user to Iomega's support page, but a search on "network printing" turned up no relevant results. More helpful was the Iomega Information Center html document, installed locally with the Iomega software. It provided step-by-step directions and I networked an HP LaserJet printer without problems.