Iomega NAS 300m review

Despite Iomega's attempts this year to reverse its fortunes in removable storage with its REV external hard disk products, the company is all too aware that it can't succeed with this alone. It moved into NAS (network attached storage) at the end of 2002 as a result of reduced demand for its Jaz and Zip devices, and has since built an impressive range of options. On review is the NAS 300m, which sits at the budget end of Iomega's portfolio. Its sleek 1U chassis delivers 240GB of ATA storage with Windows Storage Server 2003 (WSS2003) at the helm.

There isn't much to see internally, as the appliance is built around a simple SiS motherboard equipped with a 2GHz Celeron processor partnered by 256MB of memory in the single DIMM socket. Storage is handled by a trio of 82.3GB Hitachi ATA/100 hard disks, with one drive connected to the primary IDE controller and the other two daisy-chained from the secondary interface. Hardware RAID isn't a feature but arrays can be created and managed in software from the OS. Any disk failures will require the appliance to be powered down as the drives are fixed inside the unit. For the price you get only a basic 10/100 embedded network port but the single PCI slot is home to a Realtek gigabit Ethernet card.

Two installation methods are supported and either will get the appliance up and running in minutes. You can connect a monitor and USB mouse and keyboard directly and configure the appliance locally or leave it headless and use Iomega's Discovery utility, which displays any appliances it encounters on the network. Pick one from the list and you can modify its IP address or move directly to a web browser for further remote configuration and management. The WSS2003 administrative interface is simple enough to navigate and those familiar with Windows 2000-powered appliances will be quite comfortable with it.

Shares are simple to create and good security is on offer. Local user, domain authentication and access control lists can be implemented, while active and passive disk quotas can be used at the file and directory level either to enforce space limitations or to monitor usage. Anti-virus measures come as standard with the pre-installed eTrust Antivirus utility, which provides real-time monitoring of all local drives and on-demand scanning.

RAID arrays are configured from the Disk Administrator utility: for this, the web interface fires up a Remote Desktop session with the appliance. Backup options are reasonable, as the Volume Shadow Copy Service takes scheduled snapshots of selected volumes. Local backup to removable devices isn't so good as you just get the basic Windows backup utility and the appliance supports only external USB tape drives. However, workstation data can also be secured to the appliance with Iomega's Automatic Backup software. This runs a local utility that monitors disks for any file changes and automatically secures modifications in real-time or at specified intervals.

NAS appliances often get criticised for offering meagre portions of storage, and we'd have expected to see a bunch of 160GB drives for this price. That aside, the NAS 300m is a compact, well-built appliance with good client support and Windows power that provides plenty of control over your networked storage.

Author: Dave Mitchell