Iomega NAS 100d

Aimed at the home and small business user, Iomega's NAS 100d is a hard drive that can be shared across both traditional wired or wireless networks.

The NAS 100d is available in two sizes. Our review unit had a capacity of 250GB and costs £400, but there is also a 160GB model available for £330.

The drive has an Ethernet interface built into it, so you can attach it straight to a router. Or, if you have a wireless network, you can simply plug in the small aerial that is included in the box and use the NAS 100d as an 802.11g wireless device.

Once installed, the 100d shows up in the Windows Network Places control panel on each PC on the network, and users can then drag and drop files to the drive just like any other type of storage device. It can act as a wireless base station too, so you can use it to add wireless networking to an existing Ethernet network.

It's a good idea, especially for home users who have kids with vast libraries of mp3 files on their PC. However, ease of use is vital in any product aimed at home and small-business users, and we were disappointed by the poor documentation provided by Iomega.

The Quickstart manual was very unhelpful - blithely assuming that all users understand terms such as DHCP server and offering vague instructions such as 'configure the NAS with the appropriate settings for your network'.

It's certainly useful to have extra, shared storage on a home or small-office network, but Iomega needs to improve its ease of use if it wants to move its NAS products out of the corporate market into the home and small-business arena.

Prices:
250GB £400 (£340.42 ex VAT)
160GB £330 (£280.85 ex VAT)

Contact:
Iomega 020 7216 0003
www.iomega.com

Specifications:

• 250GB or 160GB hard disk with 10/100 Ethernet interface and 54Mbits/sec 802.11g wireless support
• Bundled Automatic Backup software