Iomega Home Media Network Drive user reviews (1TB)

Pros Looked like just the thing for a small home office.

Cons Hours on the phone with tech support. Very poor web site for finding windows 7 supported software. Finally tech support concluded the drive has problems .... For another $40 bucks we can send you a replacement...

Summary This is the second NAS drive I have purchased from Iomega and both are gathering dust. Fool me twice shame on me.

Pros Easy setup once you contact support to get the curent software to support Win7
Built-in printer switch
Cheap Price
Management software easy to use.

Cons Software response is very slow.
Drive inside is amazingly slow. Copy from one folder to another takes hours (literally). 8+ hours for 600Gb.
Gigabit network is a joke. only achieves 10Mb/s on optimized Gigabit network and 6ft CAT6 cable.

Summary I liked it due to price and stated performance. Unfortunately, I just have an expensive printer switch now because my 5-year-old 80Gb USB external drive transfers backups faster. I realize I am hardly a "normal user", but I really would like to use it as a backup device...not just a printer switch. I guess you get what you pay for. This "NAS" seems to work well, the printer switch works GREAT, the software looks hokey but functional, I got chat support for the software since the software in the box didn't support Win7 (chat was very nice once I came to the top of the queue). I wouldn't recommend this unit to any of my friends, though. With the best transfer rate achieved being 13Mb/sec over Gigabit connecting to my system with Teamed Gb NICS and RAID-1 drives inside and a 6ft CAT6 cable is...well...just plain pathetic. Transferring to another computer on my network (without the RAID and with a 50ft Cat5e cable), I get around 65Mb/sec sustained so I know it isn't my network or my computer causing the bottleneck.

Pros Time machine works well with Snow Leopard
Drives do mount on desktop after all
Works well for streaming HD content to e.g. an A.C Ryan Playon media player

Cons noisy
hard to set up
clumsy interface (Home Storage manager)
poor install guide and poor help functionality - if you can find this at all
changes between the firmware versions don't give you confidence in the product

Summary Out of the box this drive worked well with OS X 10.4
After updating firmware problems began.
Took me a solid night to:
- update firmware and Home Storage manager (different versions for both OS X 10.4 and 10.6 machines)
- find out that the newly created folders on my Macintosh HD (server movies, server pictures, etc) were non-functional and local anyway
- find out that in 10.6 instead I had to actively check a box in the sidebar preferences (alt click on left side of finder window) to mount servers on my desktop to make the network drive folders appear
- find out that a space in the name of the drive caused this to be invisible for both Macs
- After all of this - one night further - everything worked well and even time machine was running!

Pros Good storage, easy to use and setup

Cons After updated the firmweare, drive is locked. any small issues, such as stop backup it will cost the system lock. Tech support not helpful.

Summary The system is not smart. When it stop in the middle of the backup or any process, it locks up the drive. You can't go back to the earlier version of the firmware. Be ready to loss your data.