My iomega NAS arrived at work yesterday and I started using it last night. Here are some first impressions.
Storage Capacity:
They sell it as a 2TB unit. But it’s not really. It’s two 1TB drives in a RAID 1 mirror. So the actual capacity is 1TB (actually a little less as there is an OS partition.) You can un-RAID the drives and get 2TB, but who wants to do that? On the other hand, $200 for a complete 1TB mirrored NAS solution is a pretty good price. The 4TB (actually 2TB) unit is $600. I would buy two of the 2TB units instead…
Ease of setup:
This was a slight pain. I tried to set it up at work and failed. The unit comes configured to pull an IP address with DHCP. If it can’t find a DHCP server it’s supposed to assign itself an address in the 169.254.x.x range. Then you need to install this application that goes out and finds the unit. It didn’t work at work or at home. What I had to do was let it pull an IP address and then go look at the DHCP server to find out what IP address it was using. Then I added the IP manually to the application. The best part was that when you click on the Manage button in the application, it launches your browser! Application == useless.
Once I got into the web interface the configuration was not difficult. It’s not really intuitive for non-computer types though.
Features:
The unit is pretty full-featured. You can share out the drive using AppleTalk, Windows CIFS, WebDAV, iSCSI and NFS. You can also attach it to your Active Directory server, which I tried, but I ended up just putting it into a workgroup again with full access allowed to everyone. It’s on my home network, I don’t need to lock it down.
It also supports rsync, and each share turns into an rsync module. Pretty slick.
There is also a long list of features that I won’t be using. It has a web server and you can use it to show a slideshow of your photos. It has a torrent client, but I already have a system for that.
Other comments:
Seems to be a pretty nice unit. If you search the web for comments, it’s well liked. People complain that the web interface is slow, but I didn’t think it was bad.
There are no disk quotas. All the shares you setup pull from the same pool, so there is no way to limit usage on a per-share basis (that I could find.) Not a show stopper, but that means I need to pay more attention. If I fill the disk with torrents, there won’t be room for more photos.
The disks are a little noisy. I have it next to me on my computer desk and it’s chuckling away as I rsync my data to it. It’s not objectionable, but I wouldn’t put it in a media room.
I turned off the write caching since I don’t have it plugged into a UPS. I don’t really want to put this unit in the basement (though I could) since it’s super dusty there. I suppose I should buy a small UPS to plug it into. It supports auto shutdown with a UPS, so that’s cool.
So far I like it. I have not done any speed benchmarks yet. I might in the future, we’ll see.
