Clouded vision
I was more taken with the ability to specify shared folders on the drive to fulfil functions such as uploading photos to Flickr or FaceBook, or videos to YouTube. If you have a digital camera which supports the PTC protocol, you can connect it directly to the Nas box and copy images from it.
Share configuration
It’s the ability to share files across the Internet that makes this drive stand out, however. The Personal Cloud feature allows you to share files with others using Iomega’s Storage Manager software. Once you’ve set this up, anyone you provide with a username and password can install the software on their Mac or PC and access the shared files and folders you allow them to.
If a colleague can’t, or doesn’t want to, instal Storage Manager, they can access the Cloud Edition using a web browser. You’ll need to enable UPnP on your router to get these features to work, but the Iomega software should take it from there. I say ‘should’ because it didn’t work on my router.
Thankfully, the user manual has the precise settings needed to open the appropriate port on a router, and with these entered manually, I was up and running.
Remote access
Click for a larger image
The final cloud feature allows you to back-up data from the Nas drive to a Mozy or Amazon S3 storage account. For all the nifty features, however, I was most impressed by the Cloud Edition’s configuration and set-up interface.
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COMMENTS
Apparently titles are important after all
Quote "I'm also not completely clear if the price quoted includes a drive or not."
Clue is in the title -
Iomega Home Media Network Cloud Edition 1TB drive
You see where it says 1TB drive? That's where the clue is.
Not sure this is the product you mean to rant at.
This is a device to be used to back up a home computer and store a little media -- so if it dies either you'll have the original PC or the media will be in some way retrievable (depending on its copyright status and how it got onto the disc in the first place).
It's also supposed to be "cloud" so your photographs, for example, will be stored in one or more "clouds" as well as being on the device.
Oh, and as to RAID5 -- my current main home partition is on one but I'm not sure why since
I worked out that there's a good chance that if a drive fails one of the others in the pack could fail not long after and the stress of rebuilding a RAID could be just the trigger.
I don't think any devices of the type reviewed here are "backup" devices -- they're convenient ways of sharing data. All serious backups are off-site.
*cough*
What sort of hard drive has it got inside?
What sort of noise does the fan make?
Hate to say this
But the difference between an external USB drive adn a NAS is more than a bit of software and a network card.
What for example would the 'bit of software' run on ?
Why stop there...
I thought this was a tech site... what about how quick is a sustained data transfer. I've owned a few NAS boxes and some are dead slow and some are quick. A slow NAS is a fate worse than death when moving data around, how does this compare?
