Iomega’s Home Media Network Hard Drive Cloud Edition is a mouthful, but the figure itself is an agreeably compact NAS figure substance some of the features of a full Home Server appliance.
Its 2TB of interior hardware crapper be divided into as some shares as you like, with granular admittance permissions available on a per-user basis. You crapper also attach outside drives to the digit USB-A connectors and share them via the Network Hard Drive’s graphical web-based interface. Over Gigabit Ethernet, we saw sequential write rates of 33MB/sec and read speeds of 50MB/sec â€" alacritous enough to double a 1GB recording enter to the intend in around 30 seconds.
It’s a lowercase disappointing that there’s no space for a second interior drive. This helps keep the intend down to a front-room-friendly size, but it rules discover RAID mirroring. Instead, the Network Hard Drive comes with built-in support for Amazon A3 and Mozy backup services, for duplicating important accumulation to the cloud.
You crapper also configure backup jobs to double given files and folders onto outside media according to your schedule â€" or whenever you advise the QuikTransfer button at the front of the drive. The aforementioned system crapper backwards up your PCs too, but crapper admittance exclusive accumulation that’s mutual over the network. It makes more significance to download the client-based Iomega Protection Suite (a licence for an oceanic number of computers is included with the drive).
In constituent to base enter hardware functions, the Network Hard Drive has plentitude of handy extras. It crapper act as a server for one or digit USB printers, and as a media streamer for DLNA or iTunes-compatible devices. You crapper also configure “Active†folders, which automatically perform user-defined actions: drop a picture into the correct folder, for example, and it crapper be automatically uploaded to Flickr. Save a Torrent enter and it crapper be automatically downloaded accumulation via the Network Hard Drive’s built-in BitTorrent client.
The exclusive offense disappointment is the Personal Cloud feature that gives the figure its name. It’s a neat artefact to share your files with other people, and to admittance your files from a far PC. But the feat is rudimentary, requiring you to manually configure opening forwarding on your router to attain it work.
Before wetting out, it’s worth comparing the alternatives from Synology, our favourite NAS manufacturer. The Synology DS211J offers the aforementioned feature ordered as the Iomega, plus more integrated servers and dual-disk RAID support â€" and its Linux-based front-end makes Iomega’s scheme programme look primitive. It’s faster, too, clocking network read and write speeds of 38MB/sec and 67MB/sec in our tests. All this is reflected in the price, though: the Synology costs £160 for an unpopulated enclosure.
So, if you don’t need the bells and whistles, Iomega’s Home Media Network Hard Drive Cloud Edition is an captivating choice at a reasonable price. As long as you don’t nous environment up your possess backup system, and far admittance to files, it offers everything a home individual needs for ultimate hardware and recreation duties.
Author: Darien Graham-Smith PCPro
Indonesia Headline News Update Daily
