Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive, Cloud Edition

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Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive, Cloud Edition

April 6th, 2011 androidoholic Leave a comment Go to comments

Iomega’s ultimate Home Media Network Hard Drive offers a underline that its predecessors do not: The aptitude to let users emanate their own Personal Cloud for pity calm stored on the device. With the Personal Cloud, you can come together Windows, Mac or Linux machines around emailed invitation, to share files together with backup multi-part computers. Users can download files to mobile devices, too, since you can link up iPad, iPhones, or Android smartphones. Priced at $169.99 is to 1 TB model and $229.99 for 2 TB, this NAS is certain to be a strike with consumers (and a few SOHO users) who only wish a rapid and sincerely elementary way to share files with family and friends.

What It Is
Don’t upset Iomega’s Personal Cloud with a clouded cover service similar to Dropbox or Google Docs. With Iomega’s Personal Cloud, your information stays on the Home Media Hard Disk and does not obtain uploaded to any company’s servers. A Personal Cloud may be encrypted with 64- or 128-bit safety for additional protection.

The Home Media Hard Drive integrates with other gadgets on a home network. It’s easy to river digital files to a TV using a networked gaming console such as a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, or to river photos to a digital print frame. Iomega has moreover supposing a few wonderful formation with Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube to let users upload calm to those sites with minimum effort. we simply uploaded several MBs of images to Facebook—it’s roughly too easy, since the Home Media device uploaded my files in no time, so be careful. Make certain these are obviously photos you wish to share with the world, as they could be online before you noticed that it! The expostulate has a dual-core 600-MHz processor, 256 MB RAM, a sole Gigabit Ethernet port, and two USB ports for joining outmost storage or printers. The section moreover has a QuikTouch symbol for rapidly duplicating information to and from a USB device.

Setup and Interface
Setup is simple. You link up the supposing network line to the device’s Ethernet dock and your home router. After that, you power up. Included on a bundled CD is the Iomega Storage Manager which detects the device on my network in a few seconds.

I found the interface attractive, with an icon-driven Mac OS X and Windows 7-inspired aesthetic. But it’s rather scarce when it comes to a coherent and elementary workflow. For instance, the only way to obtain in to the clouded cover that you setup and discharge is to produce an e-mail invite; the clouded cover setup routine does not emanate a definite clouded cover admin account. According to Iomega, this is since a Personal Cloud is similar to a in isolation club, you contingency entice yourself even to access. The call in generates the access ethics which you use for successive logons to the Personal Cloud.

Also, tracking e-mail invites is basically non-existent; there is no way to discuss it who you have sent an entice to share your cloud. You can see information on all members now related to your cloud, though, by appurtenance name.

Storage Manager opens to manifestation the pre-configured default shares on the device. Iomega has expected the type of information users are good to store and has setup up default common folders accordingly; there are folders for Backups, Documents, Movies, Music, Pics, and one dedicated to Time Machine backups. Although you can access these shares by the Storage Manager, the program moreover maps drives to the shares so they are available by Windows Explorer as expostulate e-mail assignments.

Your Personal Cloud
The Storage Manager is the gateway to conducting all tasks on the device. From it, users can come in the device’s administration interface or setup a Personal Cloud. When gap the administration interface is to initial time, the device alerts a user to perform a few basic housekeeping tasks. In my case, this enclosed configuring a Private cloud, surroundings up email alerting, and editing the time. The administration UI is where all of the administration duties is to section are achieved such as surroundings up additional shares, remote access, formulating user accounts and observation network status. Iomega moreover provides access to online storage clouded cover services Mozy and Amazon S3. Configuring a Personal Cloud entangled small more than a couple of clicks, giving your clouded cover a name and then comparing an e-mail residence with it. There are only two “advanced settings” is to Personal Cloud: you can conclude which dock the clouded cover is available from and safety may be set to Low, Medium or High.

While substantiating a Personal Cloud is easy, we think administering and adding members could be a smoother process. Once we configured my clouded cover and closed and re-opened Storage Manager, we attempted to obtain in to my cloud. we wasn’t able to as we kept getting stirred for an Access Code. This was strange, as at no time during the setup routine did the program inquire me to friend an access ethics as director of my new cloud. From the documentation, we found the only way to obtain in to a clouded cover from the P.C. you initial set the device up from, is to produce an email entice to emanate an access code. It’s an ungainly way to have to obtain in to your own clouded cover and is probable to baffle a few users. Good thing Iomega has decent help documentation.