 "Iomega Home Network Drive - Built Like a Tank")
In the modern digital home with multiple PCs, notebooks, phones and gaming consoles, there rises a need for an independent data storage that can be a central node as far as storage is concern. A network storage drive that hosts all the media is often required. Running a dedicated PC day in and day out seems like a waste.
Personal data storage center for your home
To address this requirement, Iomega has launched the Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive. Network drives are common, but Iomega is known for making some really well built drives with a few unique features put into their drives. Let’s see what this 1 TB Iomega Home Media Network particular drive has to offer.
Design and Build Quality
The Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive is a simple metal body external network drive that comes with an external power adapter and an Ethernet cable. It’s heavy and because of its metal frame, it’s built like a tank. The only bits not made of metal are the back panel and the plastic stand on which it sits. Users can choose not to place the drive in a vertical position.
Plastic stand supports the hard drive perfectly
The body has a very nice brushed metal finish which gives it its very unique look. It’s easily one of the sturdiest desktop drives we’ve seen. Most manufacturers go with a more economical plastic body. There are two activity indicators on the side and a small vent at the back where the fan lies.
Features
In terms of connectivity, it has the essential Ethernet port and also an USB port to which you can connect an additional storage device such as flash drive. Tons of features like on most other network drives can be unhidden when you access the web interface controls through a web browser. The drive has DLNA and iTunes support, as well.
USB support capabilities
Windows shares are supported and so is FTP. The drive allows you to create users and set rights and permissions for them on the drive. There is no provision for quotas or bandwidth limits, though. The interface of the firmware is simple and elegant. More serious NAS devices from brands such as QNAP and Synology would typically have a ton of features. The features that are essential to a home user are available here and are presented in a very simple manner. If you’re looking for that, you’re better off with some NAS.
One of the first screens shows a slideshow of any photographs that you might have stored on the network drive. Probably the neatest feature is the torrent downloading feature. It’s not as extensive as most other NAS devices. There is no interface to add a Bit torrent file to the download queue, for example. Users are expected to dump all the torrent files into a folder on the network and the NAS picks them up automatically and downloads them. This is easy but, we would have liked a slightly more thorough utility in addition to the existing feature.
A sturdy 1 TB hard drive
Files and folders can be accessed through a web browser itself, so if you’re not really familiar with Windows shares or want to access your NAS box while you’re traveling, you can do so through a web browser. Support for TZO dynamic domain service is built into the drive, so accessing the drive remotely becomes easy.
Performance
We tested the drive on an isolated 100Mbps network and recorded speeds of around 10MB/s while reading from the drive. This is the speed we recorded while reading both sequential and assorted data from the network drive. We used 4 GB data sets in this case. These speeds are more or less the limitation of a 100Mbps network. The speeds while writing data on the other hand were appalling. Write speeds didn’t exceed 6.9 Mbps with sequential and assorted data.
Verdict
It’s obvious that the Iomega Home Media Network Drive 1TB is an average performer. On one hand, it works brilliantly while reading data from but not so well while writing data on it and that’s exactly what you’ll be doing quite often. There are some benefits, too - the interface is easy to use and the drive is easy to setup. The handy Bit torrent downloading feature will interest many as well. Being able to download and store your data on a drive without the need for a PC is a huge plus. A larger capacity drive would be ideal but this 1TB version drive sells for Rs. 7,500. It’s priced more or less the same as other drives in its category. If you’re looking for a sturdy, easy-to-use network drive for your digital home, this one’s worth looking at. If you’re looking for performance and many more customizable features, like we said before, there are better options elsewhere.
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