Customer Reviews

Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-200d 2 TB (4 x 500 GB) Network Attached Storage Server 34546

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d Promises, Promises

The Iomega StorCenter models are a promising trend in NAS devices: there needs to be solutions that address the needs of the small office / home office without invoking requirements to have a mini-IT department to run things for you, and the ix4-200d seems to fill that bill.

So when I picked-up the Iomega Storcenter ix4-200d last weekend, I was quite hopeful.

Who can argue with the value of the following? 4 TB of raw storage, RAID 5 / 10 / JBOD capability, 1 GB network connectivity and even VMWare certification (for those of us who tinker with many OS's and need such a thing). But more importantly, I like others, have grown out of the Western Digital MyBooks that litter our offices and recognize the need for a more robust storage solution.

So, as my first venture, I set the thing up to be the main backup unit in my home. It was a mistake.

I am familiar enough with Windows and Linux to recognize that as I configure the thing for the first time that there is some embedded version of a *nux OS with Samba running with a nice front end to make it an easy experience to add the storage into my network. and I was doubly impressed to see that I could add the device to my active directory domain. To top it off, the iSCSI functionality inspired my thinking around my use of VMWare and the use of virtual storage solutions. But as excited as I was to explore all this functionality in such a cost-effective box, my prudence forced a more conservative approach, and I focused my energy on just creating a solid data store environment.

My prudence paid-off: I can't get the thing to run reliably for more than 2 or 3 days at a time, and it has been a pain to get any of the special features to work for me.

For example: That WD MyBook drive I mentioned above was 300 GB of data. I wanted to use the "QuikTransfer" feature advertised on the device. So I plugged-in the drive to the Iomega USB port, and waited...and waited...and eventually the device display shows a window asking if I want to transfer data (I assume it was cataloging what needed to be copied). I select "yes" (and very happy with the simplicity of the approach) and then waited. And waited. Slowly, VERY slowly, it reports 1% complete, then 2%, then 3%...by the end of the day it gets to 25%. Why so slow?? But I'm patient, and I wait. 2 days (!) later I check in the morning, and the thing fails. I mean, just stops at 71% complete. No response. No activity. No error message! With 2 days invested I try everything I can to revive the box, but to no avail. So I reboot the box. I try one effort to restart the copy process, but it doesn't work, so I give up.

OK, I'm thinking the Quiktransfer feature (which is quite prominent in the device marketing) is buggy, I can live with that. So I plug the WD MyBook drive into my PC with 1.4 TB of storage to spare and copy the contents over in the matter of a few hours. (**note** It turns out that there was an apple backup with unusually long path+filenames on the drive which caused a problem on copy, and which probably stopped the Quicktransfer dead in its tracks. The windows transfer method at least provided a message so that I could skip those files and then move on). Then I transfer that content to the ix4. It was MUCH faster and a more transparent process, so that is what I plan to do for the other USB storage devices that I plan to consolidate.

The next morning, I check back on how my new storage array is doing. I had copied all my archive files and music into the thing and was looking forward to playing with the media sharing abilities. But what did I find? A dead brick. While I could ping the IP, none of the networking services worked. So I reboot again! Fortunately, the data didn't go away. On the other hand, that is not much comfort for spending $700 on a device that was going to be the backbone of SOHO accessibility and reliability!

I'm sorry to say that I'm back in the market for the right device. Perhaps I just picked up a unit before the software team had a chance to catch-up to functional spec and by the time you read this they've scrambled on fixing the thing. I sincerely believe the feature set is dead-on and Iomega/EMC has a potential winner, but it is a BIG miss from a marketing standpoint if they think they can push storage reliability products out the door before the product is truly ready. Good luck guys.

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UPDATE
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So my prediction sadly came to fruition. I ran a vSphere lab on this thing, and this morning one drive failed. "No problem," I thought. I pulled and reseated the drive to see the drive had actually failed. To my delight, it recognized the drive and started the long and laborious process of "Rebuilding Data Protection." Fine. When I return from work, I find the warning that "The Iomega StorCenter device failed and some data loss may have occurred." All 4 of my disks are showing up as foreign. The BEST part about it is that I called Iomega to find out that the warranty only lasts a year - after which point, they WON'T EVEN GIVE YOU PHONE SUPPORT WITHOUT A $50/INCIDENT FEE.

In summation, I wish that I could give this product less than a 1-star rating. It will be the last product that I ever purchase from Iomega; this has honestly been the worst experience I can remember having with not only product, but a company. For the ~$850 I spent on this thing, it was unsuitable for even backup data, and against my better judgement I used it for a lab and lost my 10-12 VMs. And, because I purchased this over-priced paperweight more than 12 agonizing months ago, I cannot even get someone on the phone without paying $50 to tell me that I have to find some data recovery tools/service. Wonderful. You stay classy Iomega.

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/UPDATE
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I heard about this product after listening to a roundtable discussion after one of the storage conventions. This was reviewed as being a pretty handy little storage unit to run some VMware labs, and other applications that can take advantage of network storage, but don't need exceedingly high performance storage. As I was listening to the discussion of affordable NAS/iSCSI, a great number of ideas popped into my head about how I could implement this into small business networks for backing VMs, etc. A few days later, I ordered one to test out. The results were not good.

When I reveived the unit, it was in great shape, no visible distress to the box or shipping material. The unit powered on, I started to configure the system, and after restarting to apply changes, one of the drives failed. I thought, OK these things happen. HDDs come DOA every once in a while. I spoke to tech support, and the staff was extremely nice, curteous and attentive. They opted to send me an entirely new unit, as opposed to replacing the HDD. They sent me a second unit (which arrived quite promptly), and it did the EXACT SAME THING.

Whether it's a complete fluke or not, I think that it would be a lapse in judgement for me to put any important data on one of these devices after the experiences that I've had with them. I am not sure if it's just the HDDs in the units, or the RAID controller, or what. I've had two units thus far, and neither of them have had all 4 disks (in default RAID 5) working at the same time. I am now waiting on a 3rd to arrive, but the bottom line is that I can't trust this device in the capacity for which it was purchased.

All I was looking for was a NAS/iSCSI device with mediocre I/O, and reliable performance. The iomega ix4-200d did not live up to that task, and now I am wondering what I am going to do with it. I definitely won't put any critical business data on it, or home data that has personal value. I may use it for a VMware lab, but it's of little value there as well, because labs usually fall into that area where the VMs are not important enough to be backed up, but are still a pain if they're lost. Not a good combination for what I see as an unstable storage backend.

I purchased the Iomega ix4-200d 4TB for an iSCSI server for VMware vSphere 4.

Easy to set up, once you have your desktop on the same physical switch as
the ix4-200d. It's discover protocol is not the best, but on the same switch
it was found instantly.

It is very, Very, VERY slow to create the iSCSI LUNs. Expect about an hour
per 100gb to create.

vCenter found the target instantly. The software initiator worked on the first
try via the Dynamic Discovery. Had no problem putting a VMFS on the iSCSI LUN.

The ix4-200d 4TB had 2.7TB of usable space. I was expecting at least 3TB with
parity turned on. I now wished I purchased the 8TB server.

It's a tad slow, but I must admit I have non-managed cheep switches in my
test lab. Going to try some high end Cisco switches and see what happens.

Buggy, BUGGY firmware/OS. The OS is embedded on and written to the SATA disks and is not reinstallable. I had the same issues as other users of this unit - the unit would completely freeze up and become unresponsive. The only way to reset the unit is to power cycle by pulling the power cord. Would lose CIFS and iSCSI shares and connectivity for no reason, even though the unit would still respond to pings. Their tech support was good and agreed to replace the unit, but that does NOTHING for the production data that was running on my unit...it won't stay up long enough to copy the data off the drives. Yes, I'm running the latest "stable" firmware from the Iomega site. Be advised, Iomega will quickly admit their firmware/OS is causing the problem and will send you a new box, but they will do nothing to help you get your production data off the unit as a result of their defective product. You'll end up spending major $ on data recovery. My advice, save your money & don't buy it.

Quick Summary: The Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-200d is a well-built, well-designed, network storage device that offers small office / home office (SOHO) customers an easy-to-implement storage solution plus a rich feature set. You don't need to be tech-savvy or know what "RAID 5" is to appreciate what this device can do for you. For customers who are looking to better-manage their critical business data (or even personal/home data), the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d is worth your consideration. Read on to learn my experiences with this device (with 2TB of storage across four 500GB hard drives).

Background: I'm not a SOHO customer, and though I work in the IT industry as a software developer and project manager, I don't interact directly with hardware support services. I incorporated my StorCenter ix4-200d in my home network where I already am running a Windows Home Server on an Acer Aspire AH340-UA230N Home Server. My goal for the StorCenter, then, was to consolidate several external hard drives into the StorCenter's massive storage area -- something that many business customers will likely be interested in doing, especially if external hard drives have gotten out-of-control. That leaves me plenty of space on my home server, and I can finally stop swapping external hard drives.

Although I have the two terabyte (2TB) StorCenter, I'd recommend going with a 4TB if your budget allows for it -- it's only moderately more expensive, and you'll appreciate the extra free space down the road. There is an 8TB version of this same machine, too, which is quite costly, but a necessary expense if you know you need that kind of storage capacity.

INSTALLATION

Installing the StorCenter ix4-200d was very easy. Anyone can feel confident that it's not going to be too difficult to do, or that you need to pay an IT consultant to do it for you. Once it's unpacked, simply plug-in the power cord (to a UPS, not just a surge protector alone!), plug-in the ethernet cable to connect the StorCenter ix4-200d to your router (or hub), and press the power button on the front of the unit. I liked that this unit has a lit LCD display that shows status information such as the IP address, free storage, and the progress bar of a "QuickTransfer" or whether a "QuickTransfer" has finished successfully or not (more on that later). This unit is surprisingly small, and *very* quiet though it's running four hard drives and a cooling fan. The unit is "green" -- the drives stop spinning if they're not being accessed.

Once the hardware is installed, pop in the installation CD on any networked computer (I used one that had a wired connection to my router). The software installation was straight-forward and down-to-business -- no cute intros or videos -- but it was an easy process. You're installing two programs: the mandatory program is the StorCenter's management console (which is rendered via a web browser), and the optional program is the Retrospect backup/restore software. The software automatically finds the StorCenter on your network, and you get to setup the administrator account/password and name the storage device whatever you please (you can change the name later if you want). If you're not an IT person, don't worry -- this is as simple as setting up a user account in Windows.

The installation process is somewhat halting at times, as you get interrupted at one point to register the StorCenter, and that involves creating an Iomega account to secure future warranty service. The unit comes with THREE years of warranty service but *only* if you register your unit. You may want to consider purchasing "rapid service" support directly from Iomega (for extra money, of course), especially if you have no in-house IT support.

The StorCenter creates a Public folder (with a Documents and Media subfolders) that can be accessible to anyone on your network. It also creates a Backup folder, too, for use with the Restrospect backup/restore software. Each user account you create gets its own, protected folder, too.

In very short order, I was able to use Windows Explorer to find the new StorCenter's Public folder. No hitches at all to the initial set-up.

CONFIGURATION

This is my first NAS I've ever owned. The StorCenter runs Linux internally. So, I was happy to find that the web-based interface was easy to use and, more often than not, pretty intuitive in where you go to find something. The software uses five tabs: Home, Dashboard, Users, Shared Storage and Settings:

- The Home tab gives you icons and links to most-often functions, like adding a printer or creating a user.
- The Dashboard tab shows space used, the unit's IP and serial number, and buttons to restart or turn-off your StorCenter
- The Users tab lets you create user accounts if you wish to have secured access to your network storage. You can either let anyone and everyone get access (probably not a good idea), or you'll have to create user accounts and decide what kind of access (read, write, administrator) each user gets. You can assign quotas, too, for each user (so they don't use up too much space on the shared pool). BTW, for you IT workers out there, my home network doesn't use Active Directory, but the StorCenter supports AD. Most very small businesses and home offices won't use Active Directory, either.
- The Shared Storage tab shows the folder structure of the shared storage pool (like what Windows Explorer does).
- The Settings tab is a collection of icons that let you exploit the many functions and features of this device.

You can read over the surprisingly rich function set of the StorCenter ix4-200d, but I'll share just a few experiences with you on what I've done so far.

+ Print Server: It just so happens I have a Canon i960 photo printer that I've wanted to make network-accessible without having it attached to my desktop computer, and running my computer all day long. The StorCenter has a print server, so it was as easy as attaching the printer to one of the two USB ports in the back of the StorCenter, then installing the Canon printer drivers on each networked computer. That was easy to do on my Windows XP desktop computer, but Canon doesn't make the *.inf file needed to install the printer drivers under Windows Vista or Windows 7 (instead, Canon uses a setup.exe file for Vista/7, expecting the printer to by physically attached, not attached to the StorCenter unit). Lesson learned: if you're thinking about using a print server, make sure your printer driver comes with the *.inf file that Windows requires when it searches during the printer installation.

+ Email notification: Great idea. Get immediately notified if something goes wrong with the StorCenter, such as a hard drive crashing. Problem is, I haven't been able to get it to successfully send me a text message yet. It just doesn't work for some reason.

USABILITY

My primary use for this device is to safely, redundantly store some important data that I have scattered over several external hard drives. Not only will my data be redundant (using RAID 5, so if one of the four hard drives fails, I don't lose any data -- I just swap the failed drive with a replacement, and the lost data is re-created automatically), but it's now shareable with everyone on my home network. There are three primary reasons to buy this (or any other) storage unit: to protect your data against loss due to hard drive failure, to share your data, and to back-up (and restore, as needed) any data stored on the local hard drives of every computer on your network.

Tonight I've been consolidating my data by using the QuickTransfer feature. Just plug-in the external hard drive into the front-side USB port, and select "Yes" to the LCD panel asking whether you want to start a QuickTransfer. QuickTransfer copies all the data off the external hard drive and places it into a newly-created folder in the shared storage pool. On a USB-powered hard drive, I only got a data transfer speed of 32Mbps. It took a little more than 2 hours to move 60,000 files and 33GB of data. On an old USB external hard drive with external power, the data transfer speed jumped to 81Mpbs. It took less than 4 hours to move 134GB of data. My more modern 500GB Seagate external hard drive moved its 494GB of data in 11 hours -- about 100Mbps.

I did encounter one quirk in the data transfer. After finishing with the 2nd external hard drive, the LCD display said that the QuickTransfer had failed. When I looked at Windows Explorer, though, everything looked like it copied just fine, down to the very last byte of every folder. What gives? The StorCenter's Event Manager had the answer. Both the first and second external hard drives were, indeed, transferred successfully; however, when I initiated the 2nd hard drive transfer, the StorCenter inexplicably launched a copy job that was trying to re-copy the 1st hard drive a second time - ???. Of course, the second attempt failed because I had already disconnected the 1st external hard drive. I'm not too bothered by this, and maybe a restart of the StorCenter will clear things up. What's important is that I succeeded in consolidating nearly 700GB of data over 17 hours.

A few minor design complaints: There are only 2 USB ports in the back. The print server can connect up to 2 printers, but if you also connect a UPS to the back, you've only got 1 USB for a printer. It'd have been better to have 3 or 4 USB ports, not just 2. The power-on button on the front is not indented inward and takes only a light touch to turn-on. If you position this somewhere where the front of the unit could get bumped, you might accidentally power-off this unit!

SUPPORT

If you're a D-Link DIR-655 n-network router user, be aware that I had an issue where uploading to the StorCenter worked fine, but downloading from the StorCenter only trickled to both wired and wireless computers, using just 1% of the network capacity. Support calls to both Iomega and D-Link convinced me it's a D-Link issue, not Iomega's problem. I've had other issues with the DIR-655 router, too, so once again I returned to my Microsoft MN-700 router, and everything works fine (though I don't get gigabit ethernet this way).

I bring this up to say that getting an Iomega tech support person was easy to do using the phone. And I reached North America, not India. Moreover, the two technicians I dealt with were capable and helpful, and one in particular expertly walked me through diagnostic steps showing that the StorCenter's networking functions were working correctly. Basic warranty service is 9am - 10pm Eastern, Monday through Friday.

CONCLUSION

There are a ton of other features that I haven't begun to explore yet. As I do, I'll re-edit this review to share my experiences. So far, though, I *really like* the ease with which I installed this storage device -- my first NAS unit. I like the ease of consolidating my data using the QuickTransfer feature. I'm satisfied with the speed of the data transfer, although it's nowhere near the data transfer capacity of USB 2.0 (so I don't know where the bottleneck is, but then I don't really care, either). I like how simple it was to create user accounts, and that Windows Explorer saw this device without any trouble at all. I like the Print Server function (although Canon doesn't make it ideal in my case). I like the three-year warranty service.

Final word: Visit the Iomega website and check-out their Solutions documents which give a terrific overview of many functions that are built-in to the StorCenter ix4-200d. I learned quite a bit just reading over their many documents that describe RAID, Torrents, and more. Although I created an Iomega account, I haven't figured out how to open a support ticket with Iomega -- I can see my Case History, but there is no place to open a new ticket (stupid!).

Final, final word: I mentioned that I run a Windows Home Server. For home users and even very small business owners, you should compare/contrast the feature set of a Windows Home Server with a network-attached storage device, like this StorCenter ix4-200d. I have a passion for Windows Home Server, but the feature set of this NAS device rivals the key features of my home server, and is probably a better choice for small businesses with more than 10 users. If you want to talk about those difference, post a comment to this review.

NB: This review (and device) is not for the technically challenged. You should have good knowledge of networking and file sharing concepts before reading on or even considering this product.

This is the second NAS I've ever owned - the first was a Buffalo Technology LinkStation that I used back in 2002. It was a single hard drive using 10/100 Ethernet and the web interface was downright awful and slow, though data transfer rates were acceptable.

Fast forward to 2009. Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) is common as well as 500GB hard drives and more folks know about RAID. This device seems make a nice balance between a consumer device and one that could be used in a small office network. There are simply 4 user replaceable drives in the back (the web interface indicates they are Seagate drives.) It's generally plug and play in a DHCP network - the IP address shows up on a beautiful little screen on the front of the device after powering up. It takes just a couple minutes to boot. You'll need to know about networking and file sharing (an average consumer won't be able to jump in without reading the help file on device and on the enclosed CD-ROM - the enclosed printed documentation is very basic.) You had better know what MAC, FTP, DHCP, etc. means before trying to configure the device. Nonetheless, no command line knowledge is needed (and unfortunately, you can't SSH into the device either as I'd like to be able to.)

In my specific scenario, I'm using this as a file server for accessing from my Mac environment at home. My Macs are able to access the server via AFP without difficulty and quickly - and no client software required. I was able to easily configure this device for use for Time Machine backups, a pleasant surprise. As far as benchmarks are concerned, I copied 25GB to the drive over gigabit Ethernet in under an hour (acceptable to me and comparable to USB2.0 or Firewire 400) when using Time Machine. There is also a print server for the device, though I have not been successful in getting my HP LaserJet P2015 to work on my Mac through the device over Bonjour. Other consumer-level features include torrent/web file downloading, content search, media sharing, USB device copying. E-mail notifications (through EMC's SMTP server), UPS support (it talks directly to my APC UPS!), and dual GbE ports are icing on the cake. I won't be using the VMware or iSCSI features so can't comment on that. Setting up ACLs, user accounts, shares, and quotas are straightforward. While running the device just emits a quiet hum - just a bit more noise than an average laptop with its hard drive grinding away.

I have not encountered any problems with any of the described features, except for the aforementioned print server issue. The device's firmware/web interface seems to be mature. There are other devices that cost less but may not provide all the above features. The average home consumer may find better luck with a product based on the well-reviewed Windows Home Server (and save some money too.) Home users who can fiddle with a network are a good match for this device, as well as small businesses who know enough IT to understand this review. Otherwise, you should look elsewhere.

I am a software developer, working from home and have 6 Dell Servers racked in the basement. I use these for various development activities. Servers are big, power hungry and expensive, but have their own purpose and role in my environment.

I was looking for a NAS unit that I could put on my internal private network where my family could store their Digital Photos, Documents, etc. Originally I had bought a Buffalo NAS unit that said it supported "Active Directory" integration. After receiving the unit, I discovered that it only supported the legacy Windows 2000 AD environment and this was in 2008!

I decided to give it a shot without AD integration. For those that think the Iomega NAS takes a while to configure the RAID setup, the Buffalo unit took almost 18 hours to complete. 18 hours! After it was done, the performance on that unit was like comparing a Floppy Drive to a 7200 RPM hard disk. It had the worst performance I've ever seen.

Needless to say, I called up my Dell rep and they were very supportive and allowed me to return the unit for a full refund, which I in turn used on the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d unit. I would agree that you _may_ need to have some technical knowledge, but there is enough help provided by the unit and if you can google, you can learn about specific features fairly quick. Overall, integration into my network took only a few minutes, reconfiguring the RAID configuration was fast (compared to the Buffalo unit) and performance was excellent.

I have personal folders setup for each of my family members that acts as their "home" drive on the NAS for their important documents. With the AD integration, the Iomega processes their credentials and provides access to everything they have rights to.

Bottom line, for the price, feature set (ton more than the Buffalo unit which was actually $60.00 more), speed, performance, documentation, etc... you really can't beat it.

Note: I just upgraded the firmware on my unit to the most recent one as well as the firmware on the hard drives (easy instructions) and the unit responds much faster and performs even better than before. I have both NICS plugged into a multi-port GB. The only problem that you'll run into is where to "backup" all of your data on this 4TB NAS prior to performing the backup. Since I'm configured in a mirrored setup, I ended up purchasing a 2TB External USB Iomega Unit, plugged it in and told it to back all the data up to that unit. Worked like a champ.

Purchased the 2TB version of this device 6 months ago.

I immediately replaced all of the drives with 2TB drives (WD Caviar Green WD20EARS) to get the raw capacity up to 8TB. Have been using the 500GB drives (Seagate Barracuda LP ST3500412AS) the unit came with in various computers and haven't had any problems with them.

Replacing the drives wasn't as easy as I hoped it would be, I tried replacing them all at once but it didn't like that so I replaced one at a time and it rebuilt the array each time. After swapping out the last drive it then recognized the 8TB and all was well. For good measure I then told it to reinitialize the entire array (as RAID5) before putting any data on it. Because of the rebuild times (many hours) you have to be patient but the result is that I have the 8TB unit with good quality HDs for substantially less than Iomega wants for the 8TB unit. It may be possible to change the drives faster by changing RAID levels before swapping out drives but I'm not patient enough to test out such theories.

I also replaced the fan (its a standard 92mm case fan) for a quieter one.

If you're worried about voiding warranties or aren't sure which end of a screwdriver to hold, then modding the unit probably isn't for you.

The unit has been rock solid. Its primarily used for storing and streaming media using CIFS and AFP. Time Machine has no problem making backups on the device. The web management page is straight forward and easy to use. Being able to monitor the device via SNMP is also nice.

I'm using the same firmware the device came with (2.1.9.46472) and since I haven't had any problems don't see a reason to update to the latest version (2.1.30.10908 at the moment).

The only problem I've run into so far is trying to have the unit be media server. With both UPnP and iTunes haven't had any luck getting it to work reliably. I've never had any success getting UPnP to work reliably for any server/client paring so I didn't have any expectations that it was going to work in the first place.

Fair quality build. Update the firmware when you get it. It reports up to date even though its not (the firmware update "fixes" the fact that it reports incorrectly that the unit is up to date)..... Download the file from IOMEGA and apply prior to putting ANY data on it. Had a Disk then RAID failure on mine. Called support, they reported so sorry but your data is lost. Firmware updated, unit reported all four disks good. Copied data again and had a disk failure a few weeks later. Just received the replacement "recertified" disk and the Array is rebuilding now. Nice to know my brand new NAS has a recertified disk in it three weeks after receiving it. Can you say POS? We will see if this is the final "fix" for the unit. Hope to have better success post rebuild... iSCSI builds take forever. Very much NOT impressed so far! Good luck if you are in the same boat....

Systems work as advertised. Currently have 4 of these in production use, 6 more on order. Very easy to self-upgrade the internal drives to larger drives, painless process. Not ultra-high performance compared to much more costly enterprise storage systems, but used for backup targets, VMware test bed NFS installations in a lab, or home/office use for Time Machine, iTunes storage, etc. am seeing them as very cost effective, well working solutions. Dual GigE ports was one of the major pluses as most solutions in this price-range always include a single port, makes for very simple separation of management vs. back-end traffic without need of playing with VLANs when you simply need a dual port, cut and dry solution.

Great value in my book.