Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive Reviewed

[trikster2]

Thanks for the Iomega Home Media server review:

The documentation on the device is horrible, so thanks especially on the itunes/dlna server hidden admin pages. That looks like it will be fun to play with.

The device can also function as a print server. I've configured it for an older USB printer and see the printer on my network, but the most I can get out of the printer is an error page.

Did you have to do anything special to get USB printiing to work and/or did you find any additional administrative interfaces?

Also according to google the LAN chip in the device, the "IC+ IP1001 Gigabit Ethernet Transceiver" is 9K jumbo frames capable. Yet in the article you state "no jumbo frames support". Was the lack of jumbo support based on information from iomega or your own testing?

 

[thiggins]

Did you have to do anything special to get USB printiing to work and/or did you find any additional administrative interfaces?

Forgot to mention the print server, sorry. You should just be able to browse to the server in My Network Places and install it. There are no controls for the print server.

Also according to google the LAN chip in the device, the "IC+ IP1001 Gigabit Ethernet Transceiver" is 9K jumbo frames capable. Yet in the article you state "no jumbo frames support". Was the lack of jumbo support based on information from iomega or your own testing?

I did not test for jumbo frames since there were no controls to enable it.

 

[trikster2]

Here's the reference for the IG+ I1001. Just because it's "supported" does not mean it's enabled. Do other NAS's that are jumbo frames cable have a option to enable/disable them? My jumbo frames capable switch does not need an on/off option, it just seems smart enough to deal with them:


http://www.icplus.com.tw/pp-IP1001.html

"Built in synchronization FIFO to support jumbo frame size up to 10KB in giga mode (4KB in 10M/100M mode)"

 

[thiggins]

Switches are different than NICs. Devices that support jumbo frames have controls that enable/disable and set jumbo frame size.

 

[Unregistered]

suspend

Hi,

i have this NAS also and was wandering why he didn't go to a stand-by mode or suspend, so i'll contacted the support-service.
They told me there was at first a suspend mode for the disk but there where errors and not working stable enough so they let it out, unfortunately.
I hope the fiks that.

 

[bogolisk]

more than 125MB/s

How can the throughput can be 264.4 and 281.9 MBytes/sec ???

Regardless of the kind of caching the device does at the other end of the wire, the bits are still transfered through physical wire under the theoretical limit of 125MB/s, aren't they?

 

[thiggins]

iozone measures the overall filesystem performance, including caching on both host and target systems. Results higher than physical link rate mean that Host OS caching is dominant.

Concentrate on read performance or look at the Vista SP1 file copy benchmarks for minimal cache effects.

See this thread for other discussion about cache effects.

 

[bogolisk]

iozone measures the overall filesystem performance, including caching on both host and target systems. Results higher than physical link rate mean that Host OS caching is dominant.

Concentrate on read performance or look at the Vista SP1 file copy benchmarks for minimal cache effects.

See this thread for other discussion about cache effects.

But different NAS has different performance characteristics for read vs write. My DNS-321 does 25MB/s write but only 12MB/s read (I measures the time on ftp socket read/write with 4GB real file on disc so no HOST filesystem cache was involved only DMA chain size would have any effect on the numbers.)

Basically, the numbers on the charts are only relevant to smb performance on Windows hosts.

 

[thiggins]

Results with the same color bars (same test conditions) can be compared on a relative basis.

The charts are not meant to be a measure of absolute performance. There are too many variables involved. You are correct that testing is all done on Windows systems using SMB.

 

[Unregistered]

Has anyone had any problems playing music back through their xbox 360? I just got one of these Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive's and it plays music back thru a networked PC ok but not the xbox. Any one else seen this?

 

[Seanie]

Iomega HMNHD as print server

I was thinkning of buying one of these as I want an NAS drive but was attracted by the idea of the integrated print server. However I have seen a few reviews which suggest that it is difficult to get the USB printserver to work, if at all. Any other experience out there of using this as a print server? If it doen't work I would probably consider another product.

Thanks

 

[thiggins]

Integrated print servers are usually very simple and support only printing and no other features of multifunction printers.

There are no guarantees that it will work with your particular printer.

 

[Unregistered]

No WMA lossless

Iomega informed me the unit does not support streaming lossless WMA files.

 

[DanN]

Attaching USB drives

Did you attach a USB drive when you tested the unit? Just wondering. I have one and it does not see the NTFS formated USB drive.

 

[thiggins]

Did you attach a USB drive when you tested the unit? Just wondering. I have one and it does not see the NTFS formated USB drive.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30764/75/1/2/

 

[bbarrera]

Tim, I've gotten feedback that this NAS works fine with a single computer, but slows to a crawl if multiple computers are writing to the NAS at the same time. Have you considered this type of testing?

 

[thiggins]

I have thought about it. But current testing is already taking a long time and I am adding to that time by testing backup speed. So it's unlikely that I will add multiuser testing.

 

[bbarrera]

Thanks for the consideration. Even posting a quick comment about multi-user read/write performance (rather than detailed testing) would help as many people are pushing NAS beyond single user model.

 

[Michael Pieper]

USB drive file systems on IOmega Home Media NAS?

Hi,

I just tried to attach an external USB drive to the IOmega Home Media Network Drive to backup its contents. I must say that it did not work as desired:
- when I format the drive with NTFS it is shown in the Folders section of the NAS web configuration and I can map it from my PCs. But write performance is horrible: the included EMC Retrospect software reported about 60 MB/minute.
- when I format the USN drive with FAT32, it is accessible without problems, and write perfromance is much better: EMC Retrospect reported about 360 MB/minute. But the backups stops after 4GB because of file system limitations.
- then I tried to format it with HFS+. This caused only trouble, up to that my Mac completely froze when I tried to write to the mounted disk.
- when it was formatted with Ext3, it was not recognized at all.

I now ended up to attach the USB disk to my PC to do the backup of the NAS. Any better idea?

Regards, Michael

 

[thiggins]

You are lucky (sort of) that write to NTFS is supported. Many manufacturers support only NTFS read, for precisely the reason you found...write performance stinks.

Iomega's manual says only FAT, FAT32, or NTFS is supported for the USB drive.
FAT32 can't handle files over 4 GB as you found.

I don't recall the product having any backup features. How are you doing the backup?