Next to the other devices in this Labs, the Iomega StorCenter is squat and a little fat, but the reasons why are good: it contains two drives instead of one.
Through its configuration page, it's a simple matter to define how this Nas device uses the two 250GB drives. By default, it's set to Raid 0, in which alternative bits of data are saved to each drive - in theory bringing speed increases, while all you see is a single, 500GB volume - but you can also choose Raid 1 or JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). Raid 1 halves the apparent capacity of the Nas drive to 250GB, but means the data sent to it is stored identically on both drives, giving you protection against data
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corruption. JBOD will simply fill up one drive before starting on the other, with none of the speed benefits of Raid 0. All this, of course, is invisible to clients connecting to the drive.
We like Iomega's approach to defining network shares. By default, the entire drive is available on the network with no authentication details, which is a nice and simple approach. However, you can turn on Secure Access to begin defining specific shares, creating users (although not groups) and establishing quotas.
Other than that, it's a solid enough Nas unit, if not exactly dazzling. You can hook up a USB printer to have it shared on the network, enable FTP access, and turn on Universal Plug and Play media-streaming abilities. Performance is reasonable, but it doesn't support AFP.
Our big gripe with the Iomega StorCenter concerns its installation. The process is convoluted: navigate CD to find the installer, launch it - it's a Director presentation - and when the installation process begins, first some tasks are completed using Terminal before the standard routine stars up with the system-level installer. The discovery utility proved unstable and, worse, we could only access the drive from those systems on which we had installed the software.
