Product ReviewsRemovable Storage
Iomega's StorCenter is a hard disk that you can plug into a network router or hub. This allows all the PCs on your network to use the device as a shared storage space. Installation couldn't be simpler. We plugged the StorCenter into our router and turned it on. Just as an experiment, we found out what network IP address it had been assigned by the router and typed it into Internet Explorer. This opened the router's presentation page, allowing us to configure it without even installing any software. This process took a little over five minutes. If you don't want to set up the device manually you can use Iomega's software, which guides you through the process - it took about the same time to get the drive working. Share and share alike The StorCenter is also
The feature that really excited us was the StorCenter's ability to act as a print server. According to the manual you can use the device to share a printer among all your network PCs. You simply plug the printer into the device and install its driver on all the computers you want to use it with. Sadly, it wasn't that simple. Even when we manually directed the printer set-up wizard to the driver file, the StorCenter couldn't properly speak to our printer. Transfer speeds were initially awful; it took 25 minutes to copy a 370MB file from our test PC to the StorCenter. We finally fixed the problem by chucking away the Ethernet cable that came with the device and using one of our own. With the new cable our 370MB file copied over in just 50 seconds - a speed of about 7MB/s. Iomega's StorCenter should, however, run at 125MB/s, but like other Gigabit Network Storage we've seen, it doesn't get close to its claimed maximum speed. By SPECIFICATIONS:
CAPACITY 250GB: PRICE PER GB 80p CONNECTION Gigabit Ethernet EXTRAS Built-in 2-port USB hub, Print Server function |
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