Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d

[claykin]

Tim

Great review. I wonder why Iomega chose to use XFS file system. Maybe they hired a few engineers from the now defunct SGI??

When you discuss price comparisons, please keep in mind that the Readynas NVX 2TB (2 x 1TB Seagate ES2 drives) is $999 at Amazon, Eaegis.com and a couple other retailers. Not sure if this is a temporary thing, but its priced this way for a few weeks. I bought mine at this price. IMO, this makes the NVX a better deal than the QNAP 439 and very competitive with the other offerings.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for the price tip.

 

[boerner]

Nice review. Since the ix2-200d was just announced a few days ago, I have been tempted as that unit (with 2 bays instead of four) seemed tempting.

I did an online chat with Iomega to confirm some things not clear on the website and you answered some of them (No RAID expansion once setup), but I have a few questions you may have had answered...

According to my online chat, if I register the device (whether it is a ix4 or ix2-200d) I get a three year warranty. Iomega said that also included the drives if they failed, and that they could only be replaced with Iomega drives. I could find no mention of the ability to buys spares from their site, although I did find spares listed for the ix4-200d on Provanatge.com. Did Iomega specify to you what their policy was? The lack of a compatible hard drive list made me believe what I heard in the first place...

Did you try pulling all four drives and replacing them to see if the system would work? With the relative low cost of the two bay unit, I would buy the cheapest one ($269) and rip out both 500gb drives and replace with 2TB units.

The future of this NAS line seems to have some potential since EMC bought Iomega. They no longer seem to offer the LifeLine OS to other manufacturers (like they did with the Intel SS4200), and they seem to be adding some nice features. The ix2-200d seems to have an add-on that allows backups to the Mozy service (coincidentally also owned by EMC).

I may just have to take the plunge and find out for myself

Thanks again for the good review.

 

[thiggins]

According to my online chat, if I register the device (whether it is a ix4 or ix2-200d) I get a three year warranty. Iomega said that also included the drives if they failed, and that they could only be replaced with Iomega drives. I could find no mention of the ability to buys spares from their site, although I did find spares listed for the ix4-200d on Provanatge.com. Did Iomega specify to you what their policy was? The lack of a compatible hard drive list made me believe what I heard in the first place...

I didn't get into specifics of the warranty policy with Iomega. So I don't know about spares, how long turnaround time is or advance ship before receipt of failing product. You can also be certain that they don't warranty data loss.

Did you try pulling all four drives and replacing them to see if the system would work? With the relative low cost of the two bay unit, I would buy the cheapest one ($269) and rip out both 500gb drives and replace with 2TB units.

No, I didn't check to see if the system can start with raw drives. Doing that would void your warranty, however.

The ix2-200d seems to have an add-on that allows backups to the Mozy service

Iomega has bundled a Mozy trial with its NASes since the EMC purchase. But it's not integrated into the NASes yet. You need to run the app on a computer.

 

[Ultragc]

For $560, 4x500GB unit, is this unit worth getting?

 

[Dukefrukem]

I see there's not much activity in this thread, but I was drawn to this forum after doing a google search. Iomega's website isn't really... clear. If I buy the 2TB model, does that come with 4 500GB drives? What size do they ship with?

I can pick this up for $450 and I'd rather just buy my own drives and install them. Do all four slots need to be filled? in other words, can I throw in two 2TB drives and two more TB drives later?

Their website is very poor.

 

[thiggins]

I don't know how many and what capacity drives the 2TB model comes with.
But you can't install your own drives. Part of the OS is on the drives and there is no utility to prep the drives.

 

[travisco_nabisco]

I have the 2 TB ix2-200 and it came with 2 1TB drives which is only 1TB of storage once I RAIDed it.

Best guess would be that the 2TB ix4 would have 4 500GB hard drives.

 

[Unregistered]

Tim

Great review. I wonder why Iomega chose to use XFS file system. Maybe they hired a few engineers from the now defunct SGI??

When you discuss price comparisons, please keep in mind that the Readynas NVX 2TB (2 x 1TB Seagate ES2 drives) is $999 at Amazon, Eaegis.com and a couple other retailers. Not sure if this is a temporary thing, but its priced this way for a few weeks. I bought mine at this price. IMO, this makes the NVX a better deal than the QNAP 439 and very competitive with the other offerings.

You can't compare a NetGear cheap ReadyNas Product to any Iomega or Qnap NAS...
NetGear ReadyNas is pure crapt !!!

Iomega and Qnap was certified by VmWare and are proven fiability professional products...
Compare bananas with bananas and Quality product with Quality product...

 

[lodester]

Iomega ix4-200d software lost stripe; stay away

So i have to tell this place about this horrible experience with Iomega. I feel I should give at least a little back here as I've been lurking around SNB for a few years now looking and reading up for my SOHO NAS purchases. Excellent site/resource, by the way. Kudos.

In any case. after 10 years of staying FAR away from Iomega the featureset and price/performance of the ix4-200d lured me in on the hope that the last decade in the retail storage business and injection of EMC competence would offer some reliability.
This is not the case as you will see. I'm a career enterprise systems and application integration specialist. Along with all favors of software I have been working with every grade of storage device all the way up to the big top-tier enterprise storage systems (CX700, HP XP, NetApp FT+, etc etc). I know my way around and, yes, i should have known better. But here I am.

Got the device, let it settle in for about four months before I started rolling important data over to it and set up some critical backups off of it to another NAS, standard fare. Everything was working as advetised with some minor hiccups that could be worked around. My needs for this device are not exotic, I wasn't even using the iSCSI features (yet). Just simple storage shares, no big deal.

So about 4.5 months in to light activity (couple of machine backups, some archives, some work files, etc)one day the box just locked up.

Couldn't ping it, couldn't do anything with it - no buttons responsive. LED status window was no longer changing, just frozen on the last screen it was on. this box has no hardware reset so the only thing you can do in this situation is pull the plug - literally. So I did.

When the box came back up, all of my configuration was accessible in the management view, but the single 4-disk RAID5 array was gone. The disks showed up reporting no problems. No erros in the logs except for the unexpected shutdown. The system was perfectly happy save for whenever i tried to look at the 'shared storage" the system kindly informed me it couldn't show me anything because "there is a problem with the disks" - which there was not. All the SMART indicators of the disks showed the disks were perfectly fine. The device panel was reporting 0 USED of 0 AVAILABLE.

This is a clear indication that the management software as lost it's ability to either align, identify, or read the stripe. Some or most of you know there are a finite number of conditions where a stripe becomes corrupt, with a vast majority of those situations involving some kind of hardware problem when you are using a reliable storage driver which is the case with this device ( EXT3 , any reasonably current software raid version commensurate with the age of the device). All of the other situations involve using proprietary direct disk access for identifying/managing the stripe, and such designs are unheard of in such low-end retail devices.
Furthermore Iomega writes the management software - the storage interface - on the raid disks themselves and not to onboard flash. The ability to operate the management interface along with the SMART status being all green is a very strong indication that there was no hardware failure in the disk-access pathway. This is a clear indication of what we in the business call "broken software". But I digress. Let's see what Iomega can do...... yeah, i got that feeling.

Iomega "Support" :
Long and the short of it is they advise me to seek data recovery (expected) and then re-setting the factory software and rebuilding the array.
Iomega tier3 support guys did agree with me that the symptoms did not appear to indicate a hardware failure and resetting the array (factory reset) would being me back to the working state before the failure.
And there is the problem. They want me to continue to use the same software that lost my data as the go-forward fix. When pressed, one of the tier 3 engineers admitted there was no way I could confidently continue to use the device on their software because all indications pointed to a software, not a hardware failure.

So that's where I'm at right now. After paying $500 and change for a device that I can no longer confidently use, it appears what I actually paid for is the privilege of paying a few thousand dollars more to retrieve the data from it that Iomega's software lost and can no longer access.

I had a brief discussion with my attorney about this and there is recourse, but as I suspected it's a net-loss due to the fees associated with the discovery process alone. He did say if I could find a clear indication and pattern of the software causing this kind of problems systemically on these devices a class action was the most effective course, but that poses a large number of technical and logistic hurdles. This is all old news, storage vendors have been screwing folks with crappy software since the invention of it and attrition of costs to go after these snake-oil salesmen always win, but I had to ask anyway. It was worth the $100 just to have an attorney tell me the waivers in liability given to end users does not potect a company from gross incompetence leading to material loss - and that is exactly what this is, it's just not cost effective for one person to pursue.

Of course the bottom line here is don't trust one copy of data to ever be available - i get that, but i would strongly caution anyone to trust any of Iomega's current storage devices. They just don't know what they are doing and like all the other retail vendors, their first response to these problems is to wipe it clean and start over. The other bottom line might be "you get what you pay for" because let me tell you, brother, in the storage world that is the case - and this is a shining example. Learn from my mistake!

I'm in the process of getting data recovery set up, once that is done I will be pressing Iomega very hard for a device analysis to get this problem identified and an indication of remediation. As it stands this device is completely worthless - actually worse - it's hazardous.
Good luck and fly safe

 

[Ooi]

lodester: Thanks for posting your experience, I had the EXACT same issue with my ix2-200. It was a frustrating experience because I lost my baseline backup multiple times due to the NAS freezing up on me.

First, I couldn't get the Shared Security to work properly. So I ended up going without it. Then I started running into the issues you had (freezing up, pulling power, losing data).

I've already RMA'ed my device once, they sent me a refurb with the same issues, which pissed me off because the one I sent in was brand new.

The NAS still occasionally freezes up, but I figured out why the software don't recognize the data on disk after a hard reset (by pulling power). It has to do with Write Caching - when it's enabled, it keeps a small amount of data on cache to help speed up I/O. The problem is if there's a sudden power lost, the NAS doesn't have a chance to dump the cache to disk, thus you lose the data on cache. This potentially caused the data lost problems we've been having after a hard reset.

Here's the work around I used...

From Iomega StorCenter Manager:
Go to Settings > Disks > Manage Disks > Write Caching > Select "Always disabled"

You may also want to enable verification:
Go to Settings > Disks > Manage Disks > Data Protection > Check the box "Enable periodic data protection consistency checks"

I just had a freeze up a couple of minutes ago and I pulled the power in order to reboot the NAS. My data folders came back intact, and a data verification check automatically started to make sure everything was okay.

Hope this helps.

 

[lodester]

Thanks for replying but disabling write cache and living with intermittent lockups and the general crap that is IOMEGA is absolutely unacceptable. It's like buying a car then finding out the fine print says "Car max speed is 40 mph and if driven on odd numbered days there is a chance of spontaneous explosion and death."

For the last 10 years all write cache array controllers have utilized a battery backup to allow write-through on power failure to avoid data corruption. This is a very inexpensive component to implement. Furthermore, data corruption in this manner cannot cause loss of identification of the stripe. The stripe is durable data - once it is written it remains unaltered, so write cache corruption cannot impact the stripe itself.

I suppose I should follow through on this story and bring folks up to date.

My disk analysis at the data recovery service was as expected: absolutely nothing wrong with the disks, the data, or the stripe. This leaves the failure to be squarely on the Iomega software or some unknown hardware fault. The original quote to get my data back was $4500. I was able to negotiate this down to $3000 because I know how that business works and they are still making an absolute killing because there are no physical or mechanical failures.

Since I had results for the disks I still had to call Iomega to follow up. Everyone I talk to at Iomega agrees that there is no way I can reliably use this device although they are all very hesitant to say so - when confronted with the facts they have no alternative to this answer (unless they want to simply lie to me).

Right now I'm in the process of getting my disks back and once that happens I will re-engage Iomega to persue one of three avenues

1. Iomega will refund my cost of the device itself - this is my preferred option but of course Iomega will likely only ever do this if there is a court order (see option 3).

2. Get a clear answer as to the fault and go-forward remediation. That is to say, give the device and disks back to Iomega for failure analysis. I get different answers on this point depending on who I talk to. The first two L3 engineers actually suggested this. The last manager i spoke to said this is not a service they offer. Don't you just love corporate america? In any case, I asked him to verify what, if any, options are available on this path. The point of this is to find out what exactly the failure was and how it can be fixed. This is the true test of Iomega's interest in customer service and the quality of their products.

3. We go to court. The last option, obviously. I've already paid $3600 and a ton of wasted time for what is clearly a problem with the device design/software and more to the point a disingenuous warranty. Iomega's representation of the device and their service are not what I received. Put that all together and I might as well throw another $5000 at a retainer to get some answers.

Unless there is a stunning revelation and fix provided as output from Option 2, I plan on doing something rather spectacular with the device itself - think YouTube video. Also note there is a large Iomega corporate office in the city that I live in.

If anyone has gotten this far on this thread, please - please - please do not ever buy or rely on an iomega product for any serious purpose. They have not changed in over 10 years and as a 20 year IT consultant I am very ashamed to say I have re-learned that lesson quite painfully , and i would save you from the same fate.

I'll check back once I get the disks back and can take the next step with Iomega (or my attorney).

 

[Balinus]

Glad I took the decision to return my ix2-200.

Sorry for your inconvenience lodester.

 

[lodester]

So the drives came back, I'm doing the data copy now. Next step is letting iomega know I have the original array disks back and how they want to handle this.

Not surprisingly nobody from iomega ever followed up with me on what options I have at this point and to date for this one issue three open service tickets have been opened and prematurely closed, each of them we clearly state that we are waiting for action to take place. Thankfully I have some old ticket numbers and a direct phone number to the desk of one of the 'managers' I've spoken with.

I'm leaving the door open here for Iomega to surprise me with a customer service success story - and, seriously, the bar couldn't be lower at this point - but I gotta tell you I have my doubts.

 

[stevech]

iomega hasn't had the capital for R&D since the zip drive and predecessor Bernoulli business evaporated.

It's a shame, as the Bernoulli product was ground-breaking. At the time. Then came clueless EMC.

I had an amazing 5MB Bernoulli cartridge hard disk.

 

[thiggins]

lodester. I PM'd you shortly after your last post and offered to put you in touch with my contacts at Iomega and never heard back.

 

[lodester]

lodester. I PM'd you shortly after your last post and offered to put you in touch with my contacts at Iomega and never heard back.

Thanks - sorry i didn't notice that, i don't frequent these boards but i did just reply. I wish I had seen that sooner, oh well...thanks a ton, though.

Let's bring the story up to date...

After I got my disks and data back from data recovery, on the 13th of June I contacted Iomega to take the next step with this device. The CSR informed me that to get the device back in to a working state i should contact "Tier 3" , which i could reach at 8009406354. I called that same day and was told Tier 3 was too busy to help me and they would call back "in a day or two".

I waited until today to call back, not having gotten any calls from Iomega since the 13th. Once again, Tier3 is too busy because they have only one guy and boo-hoo-hoo poor iomega. I am told I will need to wait for a call back. I refuse this course and ask to speak to a supervisor. I speak with a supervisor and he represents he is as capable as Tier3 support so he walks me through one troubleshooting step and determines the unit needs to be replaced, and immediately starts blaming the data recovery technique as the reason why the device can't start up - until I inform him that i used their preferred Iomega Data Recovery specialists. (I forgot to mention the device at this point gets stuck at 29% when trying to reset data protection (hard data reset))

Anyway .. Iomega is advance replacing me a replacement unit. They made a point of letting me know how gracious they were being by waiving the normal $50 charge they implement when they offer this service. Oh my how lucky I am.

I am tempted to sell the refurb Iomega online once it gets here but I have a hard time doing that in good conscious. Hopefully this piece of overpriced junk will be suitable as a backup for my new QNAP 559 Pro II, but honestly right now I think I would just rather get the name Iomega out of my life permanently. I'll let myself cool off while I wait for the RMA and see.

Final note; what struck me as amusing/obvious was when i told the supervisor while we were waiting for one step to finish
Me; "Hey so you know what my whole solution to this mess is?"
Him: 'No, what's that?'
Me: "I bought a qnap."
Him: "A what?"
Me: "A QNAP. NAS? Storage Device?"
Him: "I have never heard of them"
Me: ".....of course you haven't."