Iomega Home Storage Manager Software Download+mac
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Iomega's latest Home Media Network Hard Drive offers a feature that its predecessors do not: The ability to let users create their own Personal Cloud for sharing content stored on the device. With the Personal Cloud, you can join Windows, Mac or Linux machines via emailed invitation, to share files as well as backup multiple computers. Users can download files to mobile devices, too, because you can connect iPad, iPhones, or Android smartphones. Priced at $169.99 for the 1 TB model and $229.99 for 2 TB, this NAS is sure to be a hit with consumers (and some SOHO users) who just want a quick and fairly simple way to share files with family and friends.
Home media servers like Iomega's Home Media Network Hard Drive are Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices that provide a centralized location on a network to store your videos, audios, and photos.
What It Is
Don't confuse Iomega's Personal Cloud with a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Docs. With Iomega's Personal Cloud, your data stays on the Home Media Hard Disk and does not get uploaded to any company's servers. A Personal Cloud can be encrypted with 64- or 128-bit security for extra protection.
The Home Media Hard Drive integrates with other devices on a home network. It's easy to stream digital files to a TV using a networked gaming console such as a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, or to stream photos to a digital photo frame. Iomega has also provided some fantastic integration with Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube to let users upload content to those sites with minimum effort. I easily uploaded several MBs of images to Facebook—it's almost too easy, because the Home Media device uploaded my files in no time, so be careful. Make sure these are actually photos you want to share with the world, as they could be online before you realize it! The drive has a dual-core 600-MHz processor, 256 MB RAM, a lone Gigabit Ethernet port, and two USB ports for connecting external storage or printers. The unit also has a QuikTouch button for quickly copying data to and from a USB device.
Setup and Interface
Setup is simple. You connect the provided network cable to the device's Ethernet port 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 somewhat lacking when it comes to a clear and simple workflow. For instance, the only way to get into the cloud that you setup and administer is to generate an e-mail invite; the cloud setup process does not create a specific cloud admin account. According to Iomega, this is because a Personal Cloud is like a private club, you must invite yourself even to access. The invitation generates the access code which you use for subsequent logons to the Personal Cloud.
Also, tracking e-mail invites is essentially non-existent; there is no way to tell who you have sent an invite to share your cloud. You can see information on all members currently connected to your cloud, though, by machine name.
Storage Manager opens to display the pre-configured default shares on the device. Iomega has anticipated the kind of data users are apt to store and has setup up default shared folders accordingly; there are folders for Backups, Documents, Movies, Music, Pics, and one dedicated to Time Machine backups. Although you can access these shares through the Storage Manager, the software also maps drives to the shares so they are accessible through Windows Explorer as drive letter assignments.
Your Personal Cloud
The Storage Manager is the gateway to performing all tasks on the device. From it, users can enter the device's management interface or setup a Personal Cloud. When opening the management interface for the first time, the device alerts a user to perform some basic housekeeping tasks. In my case, this included configuring a Private cloud, setting up email alerting, and correcting the time. The management UI is where all of the administration duties for the unit are performed such as setting up additional shares, remote access, creating user accounts and viewing system status. Iomega also provides access to online storage cloud services Mozy and Amazon S3. Configuring a Personal Cloud involved little more than a couple of clicks, giving your cloud a name and then associating an e-mail address with it. There are only two 'advanced settings' for the Personal Cloud: you can define which port the cloud is accessible from and security can be set to Low, Medium or High.
While establishing a Personal Cloud is easy, I believe administering and adding members could be a smoother process. Once I configured my cloud and closed and re-opened Storage Manager, I tried to get into my cloud. I wasn't able to as I kept getting prompted for an Access Code. This was strange, as at no time during the setup process did the software ask me to associate an access code as administrator of my new cloud. From the documentation, I found the only way to get into a cloud from the computer you first set the device up from, is to generate an email invite to create an access code. It's an awkward way to have to get into your own cloud and is liable to puzzle a few users. Good thing Iomega has decent help documentation.
A Few Issues
I also am going to nit-pick a little about the the invite process. To allow others to share your cloud, thereby sharing your data, you have to send them an e-mail invite which includes the name of your cloud and a generated access code. During testing, I noticed there wasn't any tracking information regarding who I had already sent an email. You can see a list of everyone you invited, but once you send the email, the action buttons next to that invitation remain 'Send email,' 'Enable/Disable' account and 'Deleted' –there is nothing to indicate that the email has already been sent.
Another feature that may annoy some is that anyone accessing your cloud has to have the Storage Manager client locally installed. There is no way to access a cloud strictly through an Internet protocol like HTTPS. I suppose this is a way to keep the cloud completely private, and I don't think it's a huge deal, but I can imagine some users wanting that freedom from local software.
I want to reiterate this is not an option for business, particular if you want to access the cloud from a machine joined to a Windows Domain. There were so many issues with authenticating to my Private Cloud—I believe it was due to conflict with the fact that I was already authenticated to a Windows Domain. Whatever the reason, testing from behind a domain was a nightmare: I couldn't access my Personal Cloud. Once I was on a standalone PC, I had no problems accessing.
I also encountered one security concern. I uninstalled the Storage Manager client from one of my invited users' PC and then reinstalled to use for a new invite. After reinstalling, the PC held onto the same access code used before the uninstall. Thankfully, a reboot between uninstalling and reinstalling Storage Manager cleared the previous information when I re-tested.
Printer sharing worked flawlessly. I attached a Lexmark Pro 7005 printer to one of the USB drives and after a few seconds and screen refresh I saw the printer loaded in the interface's printer table.Iomega's device offers few advanced capabilities. Even though it supports remote access, there are no real port-forwarding capabilities and no integration with Windows ACLs or business network users. So those looking for a corporate NAS would be better off with a business-class device like Iomega's StorCenter or Synology's DS1511+ NAS. Additionally, the unit has only one enclosed hard drive, so you can't configure it in RAID or swap out a failed HDD.
Performance
The best way to test these consumer NAS devices is often with a simple file transfer. I found uploading a file to the NAS through its interface was much slower than copying the file to the mapped drive in Windows. Uploading a 1.5 GB movie file to the 'Movies' share via the Storage Manager Personal Cloud averaged a slow 5 MBps. Uploading the same file through Windows Explorer to the same folder, averaged 11.3 MBps. This is on a par with the read/write rates we saw with Iomega's previous Home Media Network Hard Drive, and the LG N1T1 NAS both of which also averaged 11 MBps.
Is this your Cloud?
Although we liked LG's N1T1 NAS—another solid home HDD-based NAS device—you get much more with Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive Cloud Edition, including a way to easily share data remotely, the ability to backup to external storage, and add a printer. Although I think the Personal Cloud software could offer more in the way of how it handles the administrator account and email invite tracking, the Home Media Network Hard Drive is sure to delight those users who want to stream and file share without need for technical expertise.
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Iomega Home Storage Manager
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Iomega Home Media Software Download
