Review: Iomega Storcenter Network Hard Drive

After all these years, Iomega is still best known for its Zip and Jaz drives. That experience in the consumer market comes in handy for the Storcenter Network Hard Drive and ensures that it’s very easy to set up and use.

That said, the manual is a bit vague – simply telling you to “connect the drive to your network”, without telling you whether you need to connect the drive to your router, an Ethernet switch or a spare Ethernet port on one of your computers. Fortunately, the drive worked first time when we connected it to the switch on our test network.

We also liked the Discovery Tool program supplied with the Storcenter, which proved equally easy to use. When you launch this program it locates the drive on the network automatically and assigns it a drive letter. Initially the entire drive is ‘public’, allowing it to be used by anyone on the network.

This means you can get started right away, and then take your time exploring the Discovery Tool and learning about additional features such as user accounts and shared folders. The Discovery Tool also runs on Macs and Linux PCs, so the Storcenter is a good option for households with a mix of Macs and PCs.

The Storcenter consists of two 250GB drives that are set up for striping (Raid 0) by default, although you can quickly set it to either spanning or mirroring (Raid 1) by selecting these options in the Discovery Tool. Iomega also includes its own Automatic Backup Pro software (for Windows only), which can perform a complete system backup, as well as just backing up ordinary data files.

Admittedly, the Storcenter isn’t the cheapest drive in this group, but its range of features and admirable ease of use make it a very good choice for both home users and small businesses.

This article is part of a group test of network-attached devices.
See also
Adaptec Snap Server 110
Buffalo Linkstation Multimedia Home Server
Buffalo Terastation Home Server
Freecom Storage Gateway WLAN
La Cie Ethernet Disk Mini
Linksys EFG120
Maxtor Shared Storage II
Plextor PX-EH25L
Western Digital Netcenter 500
Living with NAS
DIY NAS

The table of features can be read via our pdf download.