Iomega iConnect Review

[cscotto]

Great write up on the iConnect. I've been waiting for reviews of this little guy since its announcement at CES.

I'm a bit confused about the supported drive formats for the iConnect and it doesn't help that Iomega isn't totally clear about it. Small Net Builder has been the definitive place for my NAS education, so I'm turning to it once again.

Most of the online reviews or quick looks say FAT, FAT32, NTFS, ext3 and HFS+ but I haven't found any one source that has verified all the formats with a test.

The the online user manual troubleshooting guide answers the "USB storage device not recognized" question with, "make sure the USB Storage Device has a FAT, FAT32, or NTFS (Windows) format"

I called Iomega this afternoon and was told by a really friendly tech support guy that there have been reports of HFS+ working but it's not officially supported, but the rest of the formats work.

If it's possible, it would be a great addition to the review to test out drives formatted in ext3, HFS+ and HFS+ journaled.

Thanks, and keep up the great work.
cscotto

 

[inoremap]

iomega devices ix2/ix4 have hidden setup page "support.html" which allows you to open access via ssh. Can anyone confirm the existence of such preferences page on iConnect?

 

[Unregistered]

does it support...

Does the iConnect support usb hubs, allowing me to plug in more than 4 devices? Thanks.

 

[Unregistered]

iomega devices ix2/ix4 have hidden setup page "support.html" which allows you to open access via ssh. Can anyone confirm the existence of such preferences page on iConnect?

i used "support.html" (https://<ip_adress>/support.html) to get a dump of the whole device.

tom

 

[rollemoops]

My first thoughts about the Iomega iConnect.

Configured mine yesterday, and I must admit that it works pretty well, although it has some "minor flaws" (I state as "minor flaws" the ones that "could" be easily or rather quickly fixed by a firmware update -- should this not be possible, they would certainly become major flaws!).

First the good points:
- on a wired network, it's fast enough I would say, it is possible to stream films (I tried Quantum of Solace in MKV format, 1080p, not a single frame drop in VLC!) and so on, large file transfer speed is adequate,
- for Mac users, it is true that it recognizes HFS+ formatted drives, so this is pretty nice, since you don't have to reformat your hard drive.
- still for Mac users, something I find pretty neat: as it recognizes NTFS formatted volumes both in reading and in writing, you can access such volumes both in read and write from Mac OS X without having to add third party software on your Mac, really nice!
- Users management and defining users access to certain drives and not to other ones is pretty straightforward!

So globally from now, the experience is rather positive.

On the minus side, I found two strange things:
- when you plug in a drive for the first time, it doesn't recognize the name given to the volume, so what appears on your destkop is something like "USB_Iomega_Select" or the like. But the nice thing is that you can rename it in the Shar storage menu of the manager...but this is still weird, it should be done automatically;
- this is really annoying: it seems that it never stops the drives spinning when they're not in use. I have connected on mine two Lacie Rikiki drives, then went out, and when I came back two hours later, these two drives were pretty hot and spinning. Should I had connected them directly to my MacBook Pro, they would have been put in sleep rapidly. So this is a real bad point, because first of the energy consumption that could be minimized, and second because I have the impression that it will wear down my hard drives prematurely. So I really hope that Iomega will do something to fix this problem, otherwise this product will be a no-go for me, and this would be a pity for such a nice product.

By the way, I measured the following transfert rates on my WIRED GIGABIT network (not tried in WiFi): reading of a 700 MB file in 33 seconds, this makes a transfert rate of approximately 21 MB/s.

 

[zurge]

Some USB drives have a "built-in" sleep, does the iConnect not even allow this to happen?

I read the iConnect review and it mentions the ability to use rsync but after talking to a Iomega rep they said the following:


Zurge: Can i then use the rsync functionality to backup that volume to another network storage device? [10:33:30 AM]
Iomega: give me one second to check [10:34:13 AM]
Iomega: No unfortunately you can not do that [10:35:22 AM]
Zurge: is there a method to backup the drives connected to the iConnect to another device? [10:36:12 AM]
Iomega: you would have to use a back up software [10:37:12 AM]

Also, when I look at the iConnect manual online it says it can copy from NAS to NAS using Copy Jobs.

From Iomega manual:

The Copy Job feature lets you define and save a set of options for copying files from one storage device to another. That saved set of options is called a Copy Job, and you can create multiple Copy Jobs. While a Copy Job copies all data from one NAS device to another, it does not copy any permissions or access rights from one NAS device to another.

All saved Copy Jobs display in a table on the Copy Jobs page. From the table, you can manually start and stop a Copy Job, view Copy Job information, modify a Copy Job, check its last run status, and, if applicable, view when the Copy Job is next scheduled to run.

When defining a Copy Job, you can copy data from or to any of the following:

any NAS device automatically discovered on the same subnet as your Iomega iConnect Data Station.

any NAS device that you manually add to the subnet using the Iomega Storage Manager.

any external storage device, such as a USB device, connected to your Iomega iConnect Data Station.

Anyone know the deal on this and what does it does not copy any permissions or access rights from one NAS device to another mean?

 

[Unregistered]

Some USB drives have a "built-in" sleep, does the iConnect not even allow this to happen?

I read the iConnect review and it mentions the ability to use rsync but after talking to a Iomega rep they said the following: (snip...)

You can use rsync on another machine to copy to/from the iconnect - in the form rsync -a ./ root@iconnect:/mnt/[...]/backup

 

[Unregistered]

Mac problems

As far as I've found, the iConnect does NOT read HFS formatted drives...which presents me with a real problem, as I don't have enough spare space to backup my backup and re-format it!

Duh....

If anyone knows any different then please let me know how to make it read HFS volumes.