Iomega StorCenter ix2
Sure, you can lug around 1TB in an external drive, but why? There's such a thing as the Internet, after all. Thanks to some networking wizardry from Iomega, you can now turn the terabytes of data that you have at home into Network Attached Storage (NAS) and access them from anywhere with the StorCenter ix2. There's also enterprise-strength backup and security, but thankfully, you don't have to know about that. Mostly, it works. Sometimes, it doesn't. But when it does work, it's magic.
Black box
The Iomega StorCenter ix2 is a nondescript black box that looks like a UPS. There are 2 hard-drive bays that are easily accessible from the back. The device comes with a 1TB drive inside, which you can replace or expand via the second bay or by plugging in an external HDD via the USB slot in front.
To get started, plug it into your router, plug in the power, and you're done. From there, head on over to your computer, install the included software, and the StorCenter software will launch the device setup on a browser window. Get used to this, because all the action happens via your browser.
Browser blues
The web interface is, well, not pretty, but it gets the job done. You can definitely feel Iomega's enterprise roots – something the company is very proud of, and rightfully so. IT professionals will recognize the name EMC – storage specialists – and this plain black box was made with their expertise.
Local
After the first round of setup, your NAS shows up on the local network. Any computer on the network can then access the drive just like any other drive on the network. You can also browse to the device's IP address and access the files from there. It's ridiculously simple. As for transfer speeds, the limit is your network's speed, so don't expect it to be as fast as, say, USB 2.0.
Backup monster
By default, you get 500GB of storage available. The other 500GB is used up as RAID storage, meaning anything you put on the drive is automatically backed up. Though the enterprise-strength (there's that word again) archiving is appreciated, we wish they had asked first. Advanced users who already have some kind of backup in place will find this annoying and may want to maximize that 1TB drive. At any rate, a reformat is just a few clicks away on the settings tab of the Web interface.
Go to page 2 to see the rest of the review.
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| Editor's Pick | No |
| Price | From P17,000 (1TB) |
Tech Specs
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COMMENTS
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Aldrich Barcenas: For 2 drive bays? No.November 12, 2020 at 3:15 pm
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sherwin: With DSL's 768kbps upstream bandwidth, that will definitely limit how much data you can take and depending on the file size, it will take a darn long time.November 22, 2020 at 8:09 pm
