Product Reviews

Network attached storage (Nas) devices, once the preserve of office networks are becoming increasingly common in our homes as a way of backing up data and providing access to iTunes libraries and other media from multiple machines.

The premise is simple: connect a Nas to your router, and it's available to any Mac or PC on the network. This Iomega Nas, as its name suggests, is aimed at precisely this market. The Home Network Hard Drive we tested is built around a 320GB 7200rpm Sata II hard disk, though a 500GB capacity drive is also available. It's a solidly built unit whose metal case is both attractive and robust. On the rear, next to the power sockets and on/off switch are connection ports for 10/100 Base-T Ethernet and USB 2.

We connected the Network Hard Drive to a Netgear router, to which our test Mac mini was linked by an Ethernet cable. The Drive ships with software that automates the process of discovering it on your network and connecting to it, unfortunately it's Windows only. For Mac users, the best Iomega can do is offer help on how to fire up Terminal and use the 'findsmb' command to determine the IP address allocated to the drive by your router. With that done and noted, you have to open a browser window, enter the IP address and use the default username and password to connect to the drive's set-up page. Convoluted as it may seem, this was the most straightforward part of the process. Iomega's documentation leaves a great deal to be desired when it comes to explaining what to do next.

Using the Connect to server command in the Finder's Go menu should have allowed us to enter 'smb://' followed by the IP address of the drive and connect to it. It didn't. Instead it produced an error message that

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told us that Mac OS X had failed to make the connection, but offered no explanation as to why.

Much Googling, ferreting around on Apple's support pages and trial and error led us to the solution: we had failed to specify sharepoints on the drive. This is something that would be immediately obvious to anyone with a reasonable depth of SMB networking knowledge, but for the Drive's target home market, the failure of Iomega's documentation to explain it will be a significant hurdle for users.

With sharepoints created, connection was straightforward, and the drive worked as expected, allowing us to connect from multiple machines and save data from up to four Macs or PCs.

There are a couple of other niggles. The Drive ships with a copy of EMC's Retrospect back-up application, but it, again, is Windows only. Given that Retrospect won't work with Leopard until an update is issued, this may be no great loss, but an alternative would have been appropriate. Also, the Drive, though reasonably quiet, does vibrate significantly. When on the same desk as our keyboard, we could feel the vibration through the keys as we typed. This makes placing it somewhere away from your Mac imperative.

Our only other criticism is the choice of interface port. The 100 Base-T Ethernet interface has a maximum theoretical throughput of 100Mbits/sec. By today's standards, that's slow. It won't cause a problem if you intend to use the drive as an iTunes server, for example, but will mean that data transfer for back-ups will be much slower than when using a FireWire drive. As every Mac now ships with a Gigabit Ethernet port, we would have like to see one on the Home Network Hard Drive.

At £100 for the 320GB version and £120 for the 500GB drive, Iomega's Home Network Hard Drive is very good value, costing little more than a USB 2 hard drive of the same capacities. Whether it's worth buying is dependent on what you intend to use it for. If you need a back-up drive for a single Mac, we'd avoid it and go for a FireWire drive instead. As a file server for three or four Macs or PCs, or a way of sharing an iTunes library over a small network, however, it makes a great deal of sense. Just make sure you take a crash course in SMB networking first, and place the drive somewhere off your desk where you won't feel it vibrating.