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(More customer reviews)I bought the 2 TB version. It's great having our photos and music online so we can use our Sony Bravia and Blu Ray player to browse photos or play music through our sound system. And my Grace Digital internet radio now has access to 4000 tracks on our local network. So, I like it. But...
I hooked it up as instructed to our network and installed the Iomega management software. The manager could not discover the drive as it was supposed to. I logged onto our router to find the IP address and added the device manually. That did it. Minor inconvenience. Then I noticed that the NAS device advertised its capacity as 1.8 TB, not 2 TB. OK, 1.8 TB is still a whale of a lot of storage, but it's not 2 TB. Now that I've got 8000 photos and 4000 audio tracks on the drive, there's still 1.78 TB of free space. So, not a big deal.
All the folders on the NAS showed up in my Windows Explorer folder list so I figured I could just copy all music and photos directly to the mapped drives. It seemed to work with the music - never mind that it took 15 hours to copy 18 GB - but the photos didn't copy well at all. Some files were just missing and most of the others were corrupt. I tried recopying them with a direct wired network connection instead of a wireless connection, but still no joy. What finally did work was to enable the FTP server on the NAS and use a FTP client (Filezilla in my case) to upload the photos. Not only did it work with no corrupt files, it took a fraction of the time that the file copy took. It worked so well that I deleted all the music and uploaded it a second time using FTP. Why take chances? It took 2 hours instead of 15. Nowhere could I find in the user's manual any tips on adding content to the drive. That would have been useful.
I tried enabling the personal cloud function. The NAS is supposed to configure the router automatically but it failed to do so. I was unable to figure out how to configure the port forwarding function on the router to make this work, trying every combination of IP address and port suggested. Now, my router is about 6 years old, which is 2 centuries in router years, so I bought a new router. It was less than $40 and I haven't tried it yet, but I'll let you know.
Still all minor inconveniences, right? But what I can't abide is the darn thing seems to take itself offline from time to time. I can't get to it with the manager or it's web page. I have to reboot it to get it to work, and it take seven forevers to reboot.
Summary: great concept, great result when it works, but in a world where nothing is easy anymore, what gets me excited is a product that does what it's supposed to without sucking up hours of my time. This one's not quite there yet.
UPDATE:
The new router wasn't by itself sufficient to enable my personal cloud, but once I enabled the UPnP function on the router, the NAS was able to configure its ports. STILL no joy. I chatted up Iomega's tech support and they led me through their checklist, most of which I had already tried, but when they're running out of ROM you don't push the interrupt button. Everything at my end seemed copacetic so my next call was to my ISP, CenturyLink. I've called CenturyLink's tech support before and they are AWESOME. Dave the Tech Support Guy suggested that I needed to "bridge my modem" and took me through the process step by step. In two minutes it was done and the NAS synched up and made the connection. Yay! But I'm, still trying to figure out the personal cloud and it seems to be hit or miss when I try to connect. It's always something.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Iomega 1 TB Home Media Network Hard Drive Cloud Edition 34763 (Gray)
Get high-capacity, reliable home network storage with the Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive, Cloud Edition. Easily share and access files, photos, videos, and music between computers and with friends and family. It's powerful and fast, plus the three-step set-up is very simple, even if you're never used a network drive before. This feature-rich drive has a built-in UPnP AV Media Server (DLNA certified) and iTunes Server so content can easily be shared between computers and any other digital media adapters such as game consoles, digital picture frames, or networked TVs. Plus, automatically post files to your Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr accounts. Availalbe in 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB capacities.
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