Iomega Storcenter IX4-200D NAS 12TB (4 x 3TB) 4-bay Cloud Edition 34791 Sale
- Brand Name:Iomega
- Depth:7.9"
- Form Factor:Desktop
- Hard Drive:4 x 3 TB - Serial ATA/300 - Serial ATA
- Height:6.6"
Best Review: Iomega Storcenter IX4-200D NAS 12TB (4 x 3TB) 4-bay Cloud Edition 34791 - Updated Aug 24, 2012:1. The ix4-200d has been working without incident since I wrote this review.2. The unit has handled firmware upgrades with aplomb.3. The unit is very resilient to abrupt shutdowns and bounces back in minutes.4. Iomega's free QuickProtect is a handy utility for automatically mirroring folders to a share (with versioning support).5. I strongly advise against using RAID5 with this unit especially when storing critical data.The allure of RAID5 is the ability to use 3TB out of 4TB, rather than the 2TB you get with RAID 10. Of course, this assumes that RAID5 protects your data as well as RAID10 does. I.e., when a disk fails and is replaced, the entire array will be rebuilt and any lost data will be recovered.Unfortunately, with the non-enterprise grade drives used in this unit, you run a 25% chance that your 3TB rebuild will fail with complete data loss. On a 6 TB rebuild (with the 8TB version), this risk rises to 50%. This is because the drives used in this unit have an unrecoverable error rate of once every 12 TB (10 to the power 14 bits). Not very good odds to play. If you must use RAID 5, please consider using enterprise grade hard drives. The downside? They cost roughly thrice as much. But what price be memories?Also do note that no matter what RAID level you pick - if you are backing up once in a lifetime documents or photos - you should also be considering backup either in the cloud or some other off site location. At best, a RAID protects you against disk drive loss. It won't protect you from bad decisions (like when I accidentally formatted my disk) or from data corruption.~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~First of all, note that this is not your run of the mill network attached hard drive. This is a small business grade Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution. As a result, its configuration options can be overwhelming at first glance, but it is undoubtedly an extremely rewarding device to get to know.First the awesome:#############1. Lots of RAID options:# JBOD (Just a Bunch/Box of Disks) - i.e., the entire array is treated as a set of 4 independent disks. The bad thing - if a drive crashes you lose the data on that disk. The good - you get your full 4TB of storage. This shows up as the option "None".# RAID 0 - Data Striping : i.e., some bytes of your data go to one disk and other bytes to another. This writing occurs in parallel, so it is faster than JBOD, and you get your full 4TB - but still no data recovery. This shows up as the option "None (RAID 0)".[Note Daniel's comment below: Still no data recovery but much worse than JBOD, if one disk fails, you lose ALL data, multiplying the probability of losing all data by 4, that mode should only be used for temporary data that needs fast read/write speeds but is safely stored somewhere else or can be easily recreated.]# RAID 10 - Mirror/Stripe: i.e., the same data is written to two sets of disks - and striping is used to increase speed. The bad thing - you get half your storage capacity (2 TB). The good - you have full live data redundancy.# RAID 5 - (No longer recommended - especially for critical data). One drive's worth of data is reserved for parity data. The good - even if one of your disks crashes, the IX4 can rebuild your data without loss. The bad - one drive's worth of space is lost, so you get only 3 TB of storage. This shows up as "RAID 5".I left my IX4 at RAID 5, and also decided to disable writing to the cache. This makes writes slower, but does ensure that even on a power failure, all data has been written to the disk.2. Security is top notch.There are options to enable HTTPS-based security. You can also create authentication/authorization rules using users as well as groups, and you can specify access to shares for these users/groups. Do note that the certificate presented by the IX4 is signed by itself. What this means is that you will be presented with a scary warning about an invalid certificate.3. Remote Access and the Personal CloudEnabling remote access to this drive is simplicity itself. The device itself can do much of the heavy lifting of configuring port forwarding on your router. The nice thing is that it uses port 443 (the well known https port) so you can access your drive easily from any location - incl. through corporate firewalls. It also comes with 12 months of basic access at TZO DNS, which lets you avoid having to memorize your IP address.While the concept is rather intriguing, I have not enabled my personal cloud yet - for the simple reason that I don't really need others to access my NAS. The remote access for myself (and family) is more than sufficient for my needs.With remote access enabled, it even works great as a personal version of the popular Dropbox file hosting service.4. Automatic backups - actually more like synchronizationThere are a few options here, including synchronization with Mozy and Amazon S3. Unfortunately, I use neither. (I prefer iDrive by far.)Instead, I rely on the ix4's simple XCOPY-like "Copy Jobs" backup solution. This feature automatically copies files from any external drive/share folder to another location, on a configurable schedule. This is not true backup - so there are no full/incremental/differential backup options. It functions more like Microsoft's SyncToy, on a scheduled basis.5. QuikTransfer is simply awesome. If you are like me you have a number of disks of varying capacity strewn around your network. With QuikTransfer, you connect one of those hard drives to one of its three USB ports using an USB cable, and you can immediately transfer content on to the IX4 - with no computer necessary! (This feature leverages the "Copy Jobs" function described above.6. Works as a media server.7. Active shares are a crazy good idea. Can you imagine dropping photos into a folder and having them automatically uploaded to Flickr or Facebook? How about dropping videos into a folder for automatic uploads to YouTube? Or even automatically kicking off a Torrent download, just by copying a .torrent file to a share? Well - the IX4 does just this using its active folders idea.8. Firmware update was as painless as it can get. I downloaded the file from the Iomega site, uploaded it to the IX4, and then applied the update. After a long while digesting the update, the device was back up and running - all shiny and new.9. Supports a zillion protocols. Incl. FTP, rsync, WebDAV, Bluetooth (with optional adapter), etc. I haven't enabled these - except for trying out FTP, which worked great with my FTP client (FileZilla).10. The LCD on the front of the window is a nice touch. It shows useful information such as the IP address and also provides a rudimentary user interface to interact with the unit.11. It is fairly easy to remove/replace drives in their bays. You open two thumbscrews, and each drive has a little plastic handle that you can tug at gently to release it from its bay. Inserting it is also just as easy.12. A very generous 3-year warranty for the device.Now the not so awesome:#################1. Right out of the box, the ix4 required warranty support. Yes, Iomega's tech support is awesome. However, I've needed to resort to it twice for Iomega products (incl. the iConnect device) - which is a not-so-positive statement on their Quality Control. Turned out that one of the hard drives had failed. Again, their stellar customer support analyst had a replacement dispatched quickly, without needlessly wasting my time.2. A major security issue with enabling remote access is that everyone who stumbles on to your IP address will be able to access your shares - without logging in! Fortunately, the solution is to simply turn off the Home Page. I can't imagine what the firmware developers were thinking!3. Functional user interface. This is not a UI to emulate or rave about. It does its job. That's it. It takes a long while for pages to refresh, the categories are not quite intuitive, and everything requires a popup dialog. With the latest firmware, all the applets have been consolidated into a single page - "All Features". This helps quite a bit in having to hunt for features. There is a tab for commonly used features - but its entries are not customizable.4. Error messages for an internal fan failed error keep showing up. The fan seems to be running just fine (according to the System Status display as well as physical inspection) - so I'm ignoring this for now.5. QuikTransfer has bugs. On one run, the copy process halted at 99% complete for over 3 hours. Turns out it was creating a temporary "lifeline" file that was over 300GB in size, before I killed the process. Not sure if the new firmware fixed this problem. Fortunately, it's a simple copy so you can recover without too much effort.Conclusion:#######This is definitely one of the most featured NAS device that I've had the pleasure to use. Even the problems I've documented above can be classified more as annoyances rather than show stoppers - all of them can either be fixed or tolerated.This is the perfect device for enthusiasts - the features are almost overwhelming, which makes it fertile ground for configuration and customization. If you have the time to spend, there doesn't seem to be much that the IX4 doesn't do.Despite my initial negative experience, I've slowly grown ever more reliant on it. Read more ›
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