- Iomega StorCenter 1TB
Netgear DG834PN
Surfing on the web before buying Iomega StorCenter 1TB was not very encouraging. There are quite a few people who consider the device noisy, overheating and difficult to connect. Because I have had good hardware experience in my work with Iomega’s 160 GB USB disk, I dediced to give them try.
It was clear before buying the product that the quality of Iomega software is not so great and their minimalist documentation suggest to customers a Mac-like, easy User Experience. This makes an impossible combination and I spent quite a while to prepare Windows Shares on the box. You can actually get it working somehow quite quickly but as soon as you try to make it work as you have planned, the trouble begins. It was actually so difficult that I wrote everything down to be able to repeat the operation on other machines later on. I put the document, named How To Setup Iomega StorCenter Shares online. If you have a mixed installations with Windows XP/Vista like I do, you may want to take a look.
Good
- Robust casing
- Not actually overheating (maybe under a heavy load) if you do leave some air around it
- Based on Linux and Samba (some may consider this bad)
- RAID-0 / RAID-1 configurable two disk array
Bad
- Really noisy
- There is a time-out setting for inactivity but in practice the system never spins down
- Bad documentation with 16 languages but no pictures
- Supporting discovery software has about ten years time lag
Despite all critics, I have my shares working and whopping 450 GB of mirrored, cleverly shared disk space on my network. I would give them 6 1/2 out of ten.
