Full marks to Iomega for spelling out its
plans and intentions when it named the EZ Media & Backup Centre. There's no
mistaking the intended market for this drive, and you have every right to
expect that it will live up to the EZ tag and make your life as easy as
possible.
Iomega
1TB EZ Media & Backup Centre
On the other hand, the styling people on
Iomega's team need a bit of a slap, because the black aluminum case of the NAS
looks terribly dull. This is a tragedy, since the construction is solid and
high quality, but you wouldn't get that impression unless you took a good look.
The Iomega stands upright on four rubber feet and feels somewhat unstable in
that orientation. In an ideal world, we would lay the Iomega on its side, but
that might affect the cooling of the drive. Since this is a passively cooled
unit, you need to leave a decent amount of the surface uncovered. The absence
of a fan means that the only noise comes from the 3.5" SATA 3Gbps hard
drive, which is very quiet in operation and overall the EZ Media & Backup
Centre is effectively silent.
Iomega
1TB EZ Media & Backup Centre
The vented front panel appears to carry a
large button (for power perhaps?), but the button turns out to be nothing more
than an Iomega logo. Under a glass panel there are two LEDs, pale blue for
power and dark blue for hard drive activity.
Turning to the rear of the NAS we find the
power jack for the external adapter, the gigabit Ethernet port, a USB 2.0 port
and the actual power button.
In theory, you can use the Iomega as a
network drive without installing any software, but you would be well advised to
use the Iomega Storage Manager on each client PC that might be used to
configure the Iomega NAS if you want to get the most from this device. Iomega
Storage Manager also installs Iomega Quikprotect for synchronizing files from
Windows personal folders and Twonky Media for streaming media to other
networked devices.
By default, six shared folders are created
for Backups, Documents, Music, Photos, Shared Media and Videos, which seems to
cover the spectrum comprehensively.
We have sometimes wondered about Iomega's
pricing, and this is another instance where we have to raise a question mark.
The 1TB has an SRP of $223 and sells for $190, the 2TB is $287/$223
respectively, while the Big Daddy 3TB costs $399/$319 respectively. We can
forgive the fact that the 2TB Iomega costs the same as the 3TB Seagate
FreeAgent, because Seagate manufactures drives and Iomega has to buy them.
Iomega delivers considerably better performance than Seagate, so it's pretty
much a straight battle between the 2TB Iomega and the 3TB Seagate. The problem is
that we were sent the 1TB Iomega for this group and that looks rather
expensive.
Our other problem is that the Iomega fails
to live up to its EZ billing. While this is a simple NAS to install, the
configuration screen could use a makeover. This is the sort of thing that
Belkin has got absolutely nailed with the wizard setup in its Wi-Fi routers,
and Iomega would benefit from a touch of that mojo to make life easier for the
customer.
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Details
·
Price: $190
·
Manufacturer: Iomega
·
Website: go.iomega.com
·
Required spec: Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.5
onwards
Verdict
·
Quality: 7
·
Value: 7
·
Overall: 7
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