Customer Reviews

Iomega iConnect Wireless Data Station 34779

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(48)

 

 

I was very wary about buying this product with so many negative reviews, but I wanted a way to make my USB printer accessible by the rest of the family from their wi-fi enabled laptops. I also thought it would be handy to add USB storage in the future. I looked at various NAS storage solutions, but all of them were more expensive than I needed for this simple job. The iConnect arrived, I followed the simple instructions, and, so far, it has done everything I wanted it to do.

I followed a couple of steps that may not have been obvious - I first of all plugged a 2GB flash drive into one of the USB ports to give it some local storage for its print serving function and connected it to a LAN port. I was able to see it fine, I checked for updates and found a newer release of firmware - that downloaded without problems and the device restarted. Then I set up the wireless information - no problem with seeing the WiFi from the basement. Then I disconnected the LAN and tried to connect wirelessly. It wasn't immediately seen by the iConnect software, and I noticed that there was an updated version of that software as well, so I downloaded and installed that. At that point, I could see the device and its storage wirelessly. I did give it a static IP address on my router, but that may not have been necessary. Finally, I plugged in the USB printer, loaded the drivers and it all worked fine.

I loaded the iConnect software on a couple of laptops (XP and Vista), updated the software, and then could see the printer.

Overall, this has worked as planned - I haven't stressed it yet, and I wish it had been seen wirelessly as soon as I had disconnected the LAN, but I got there in the end.

I've hooked this up and experimented with it from Windows XP, Linux, and OS X and so far the basic functionality seems to work fine. Many of the negative reviews seem to be related to an early bad batch that went out, and as far as I can tell Iomega corrected that particular problem before they sent me this item to review.

I do have a few concerns here.

The documentation isn't great, particularly when it comes to the Linux support. I'm very pleased that they chose to support Linux, but it seems as if it may have been an afterthought. In the manual that comes in the box, for example, it mentions how to run the software on Windows and Mac, but mention of what to do on Linux is completely absent. I was able to figure it out without much difficulty, but I would be hesitant to recommend this as an option to a very new Linux user for this reason.

When it comes to the documentation included on the install disc, and the documentation on the company website, I didn't find it to be as complete or clear in its explanations as I would hope.

I also have some concern about the way it seems to use the drives. When I normally connect an external hard drive, if it's not being used for a while it will go into a low power mode. That never seems to happen if I'm using the drive through the iConnect. That fact alone would make me hesitant to set this system up with a couple of drives plugged into it and just leave it running. If I'm going to have to be connecting and disconnecting the drives from this anyway, I'm not sure how much I'm really gaining over the option of just connecting the drives to the computers themselves as needed.

It's entirely possible that these are things the manufacturer address, and I hope that's what happens. In the meantime, I could certainly see this as being very useful to use with printers, and perhaps to plug in a hard drive in one room so that you can easily work from a laptop in another without having to lug the drive around. Unless you have a specific use in mind for it though, I'm not yet convinced that this has enough to offer to users in general to recommend it as a general convenience item.

First unit I bought, blinking blue light of death. Returned it & figured I'd give it another shot, hoping I just got a bum one. Second unit, blinking blue light of death, item will be returned. 0 for 2, done with them until I read they've worked the bugs. Great idea, and features look good on paper, but the POS does not work.

BTW, I bought this as a replacement for my Hitachi SimpleNet, which is slow as dogmeat, esp on the writes. I thought the GigE of the Iomega would be a big improvement, but alas no luck. So I am back to the Hitachi, which worked right out of the box, no client side SW to install, just plug & play. It also works with a USB hub. I currently have 1 320G Iomega, 2 2T Western Digital, 1 80G Wolverine and 2 flash thumb drives plugged into the USB hub, and then the USB hub plugged into the SimpleNet. I was able to map all of those drives as network drives to all my home computers (2 wired & 1 wireless) with no problem. My Asus media streamer was also able to see all drives and I was able to stream video content from these drives over the SimpleNet to the Asus and my TV. Since the writes (esp to the NTFS drives) is so slow, I just unplug the whole USB hub from the SimpleNet & plug directly into the USB port of my computer when I want to copy a lot of data to the drives, then I just plug the USB hub back into the SimpleNet and they are all back on my network. I can go back & forth like all the time with no problems.

I have 4 external portable harddisks from different manufacturers (Lacie, Seagate and WD) with size varying from 500GB - 1.5TB. Also I have a home network consisting of 3 computers (a Mac OS X based MBP, a windows XP based laptop and Ubuntu based Desktop). Besides I have a few VMs in my MBP running inside VMWare Fusion. I was looking at a network based solution to access these hard disks in a centralized fashion. And then I came across this product in Amazon. Initially I was a little apprehensive because of some of the negative feedbacks it had generated. But I went ahead anyway to give it a try thinking I could return it back in case I am not satisfied. Boy, was I glad I purchased this product! It is one of the best in its category.

Amazon did an amazing job in delivering it way before the expected date. I unboxed my iConnect and plugged it in my router via ethernet port. I didn't go for the wireless connectivity (because 1. it will be slow as compared to ethernet connection 2. wireless connection being unreliable sometimes may corrupt the hard disk if you are in the middle of a data transfer) I also installed the associated software and did a basic default configuration. Then I attached all my 4 hard disks to iConnect. The entire setup took around 30 mins. After I was satisfied with my basic setup, I played around with some advanced configuration like security and remote access over internet.

Goodies:
1. All the 4 harddisks were immediately accessible over the network.They appeared as network drives in my windows network. You might have to play around a little to ensure that they are part of the same work group by going into the iConnect management console and selecting settings->Network services->Windows File Sharing(CIFS)->Workgroup Name. MBP was also able to mount them as volumes after I enabled settings->Network services->AFP Settings. My Ubuntu box was able to identify the volumes as a windows based file system
2. My MBP was able to recognize it as a valid Time Machine based backup option after I enabled settings->backup restore->Time Machine. The first time backup was terribly slow. It took 24 hrs to copy 330GB of data over the network which is reasonable as my MBP was connected to the network wirelessly. However, subsequent incremental backups wererelatively faster (15 GB in an hour)
3. The iConnect acts as a DLNA Server and was instantly recognized by my DLNA capable TV. However, it was not able to recognize all types of movies I threw at it as the number of codecs it supports is limited.
4. You can enable security at disk level (not at folder level) and assign users with different levels of permissions (read, read-write etc)
5. You can access your hard disks over internet with an optional remote access facility(A free subscription from TZO for first year. After first year, you have to pay). You have to enable remote access in the management console. However, since I already have a dedicated domain, I simply configured my wireless router to listen to a non-standard incoming port and redirect the traffic to the management console of iConnect. I did NOT have to enable the remote settings feature in iConnect management console for this to work. If you don't have access to a dedicated domain and don't want to subscribe to TZO, you still can access your hard disks over internet via the IP address assigned to your router. In my experience, even if you have a dynamic IP based internet connection from your internet provider (most of the home internet connections are not static IP based), the IP address rarely changes.
6. I seem to come back to the Shared Storage facility within the management console everytime I access my setup over internet. It gives a unified view of all the harddisks with following features: drill-down capability to access a file/folder, basic file management facility like delete/view etc, safely remove a harddisk from the system, modify access to the harddisks, search across all the harddisks for a specific file
7. There is a cool hardware status feature in the Dashboard tab of management console which shows the temperature of the CPU as well as the NIC besides indicating whether the device is in safe temperature range. One good thing is most of the time I have seen the device in this range. It is barely warm.
8. You can setup a email notification service. In case of any issue, the device sends an email to the configured email id with the details. I actually saw a message once from the device when it encountered some network problem. At that time, I thought it was really cool.

Baddies:
1. The management console sometimes (very rarely in my experience) is not accessible presumably when there is some CPU, I/O intensive operation.
2. The iConnect driver always throws a notification during application start-up saying a new driver update is available. However, clicking on that notification to update the driver, does not take me anywhere.
3. The iConnect driver for linux threw some fatal error during its installation and led me to believe its not supported. However, the drives became available as mounts only after I restarted the system.
4. In case your hard disk contains multiple partitions, the iConnect only detects the first partition. I faced a similar problem for one of the hard disks and had to merge all my partitions
5. In the web based management console, you can only work upload one file at a time. You cant select multiple files and upload them. But you can certainly delete multiple files/folders.

Not Tested Features:
There seems to be a wealth of other features which I have not tested yet.
1. Schedule Copy jobs
2. Schedule Torrent jobs
3. The Picture Transfer Protocol allows pictures to be loaded to the Iomega iConnect by plugging a compatible camera into a USB port.
4. iConnect supports Print Server functionality and enables a USB based printer to serve as a network printer. Since I dont have a printer at home, I could not test this functionality.

Overall, I am pretty happy with my purchase. The only bad part is: I saw the price getting reduced from 70$ to 60$ just after couple of days of my purchase. Its not a big deal though.

In my experience so far with this product, it works for a few hours after being set up, but then the connection to the drives plugged into the unit disappear, and the unit has to be rebooted to get them to appear again. This makes it useless for doing things like large backups or importing large libraries into ITunes.

Iomega has a nice idea, but so far, it barely works.

This is a great product but I think the average user may not be tech savvy enough to set it up.

My setup / use:
I use it to automatically backup my windows machine (using the built in windows 7 backup tool) and my MacBook Pro (using time machine) as well as to store all of my media so that I can stream to my computers via iTunes and iPhone 4. I am doing all of this in conjunction with the linksys wrt310Nv2 router.

Setup issues:
Time machine backup was easy but instructions were hard to find so I just figured it out:
(1) enable time machine back up on the iConnect then add a subfolder to tell the time machine where to backup. For apple host network name, enter the computers name (so-and-so-macbook-pro) with the apple ethernet ID set to the mac address of your mac (to find your mac address, go to terminal and type: ifconfig en0)
(2) setup time machine on your system

I couldnt find a good instruction manual for setup so I pretty much winged everything - it worked out in the end but it could be streamlined with a pamphlet included in the packaging.

Other issues:
The software that iomega supplied doesnt launch on my Windows 7 system - I dont know why. I havent tried on my mac because I have a work around. You can tune your iconnect using your web browser. If you setup remote access, just enter the URL that youve configured it to work with. Otherwise, go to your LAN setup and find the local IP address of the iconnect and enter this into the web browser. They should fix this issue.

Also, the iconnect sends me an email every other day saying it cant connect to the LAN port 1. I dont really know why and if it really couldnt connect I wouldnt get the email. Hopefully they update the firmware soon and remove this issue.

Here is how I stream music from my iConnect network drive to my AppleTV (since AppleTV doesnt have the ability to read the iTunes server built into the iConnect)
I use the 8player app on my iphone 4 to locate the files in the iConnect. Then I begin to play them on the iPhone and then beam them to the AppleTV via AirPlay - it works but apple should just allow iTunes servers to appear on the AppleTV. This solution costs $5 and only works for mp4 videos.

Overall, I am very happy with this product since I had some external USB drives laying around that I found good use for - I now have a home file server, over-air backup and a media server and it all plays nice together. I would recommend this product if you have similar equipment as me or if you're trying to do what I've accomplished with this device.

The product is really good, the design is awesome, you can set it up really fast and has a nice interface.
But be careful with the disks and the printers that you want to use, It does NOT work with multi function printers (the ones that also have scanner and/or copy machine), it simple doesn't recognize them (even with good printers brands like HP); also if you have a hard drive that has a partition with 2 different formats, it just recognize one partition leaving the other one hidden; finally, in the interface you can control who can change the files on the disks, but you can NOT control who can view them, so everyone on the local network can access them, kind of sad.
So be careful with the hardware that you have at the moment before buying this product.

I have never left a review for any product, but I really have to leave some terrible comment for this product. This product,..will shock you a lot. It is horribley slow (650kbps for transfering file) either wireless or wired connection. Printer server? It is just pathetic. I guess if you really want this junk device in your network, you better have 1 Giga LAN router (mine is 100Mbps D link 614 router). If this device came out about 10 years ago, I would say this is an revolutionary device. But now, it will waste your money and drive you crazy.BTW, I will never, every buy any product from Iomega. I am SOSOSOSOSOSOSOSOSO dissappointed..!!!!
Iomega iConnect Wireless Data Station 34779

I had been looking for a network attached storage device for about a month when Iomega introduced this iConnect product. It looked and sounded ideal. In theory, I could attach multiple normal external hard drives and 'see' them anywhere on my home network. I didn't really care about being able to access the storage from outside my home network, as the first reviewer discussed... I just wanted to be able to back up computers to a single wireless location, hide that device somewhere in a closet in the house and get on with life.

I got the iConnect from (...) when Amazon listed the item, but didn't have any stock. I received my product quickly, read the skimpy manual, installed everything and then connected an external drive. I then removed the device from the wired cable connection to my router and tried accessing the drive wirelessly. It worked ok... but the iConnect was about 15 feet from the router. I tried backing up my music file, and after an all-nighter, got everything moved to the external drive. However, when I moved the iConnect and external drive to the room in my house where I intended to permanently locate it, nothing! Zip! Nada! Zilch! The drive was too far from the router to be detected. That router reaches that room, at least for my netbook connection, but the iConnect was invisible.

I moved it closer, but unless the iConnect was in the same darned room, the connection just wouldn't come. Even when it was close enough to connect, the speed of the transfers was unacceptable.

Plusses:
- it is small and looks cute. Black, as you know, goes with everything!

Minuses:
- it is very poorly documented. The setup guide is a page or two. The real documentation is available as an HTML doc which is a pain in the neck to read or search.
- the software was rushed to the market. For example, when logging on to the drive, after entering your username, it tries to log on before you enter the password field, resulting in an error message. Not a huge deal, but just poorly designed.
- Technical support - at least in the early days of release - didn't know much about their own product. One fellow I spoke to didn't know what the iConnect was and the others really didn't know how to help me. Messages posted to their site never got past their forum monitor. Iomega apparently only wants happy talk on their forum, even though I wasn't critical, just asking for help.
- the wireless range on this device is puny. It's more like bluetooth range than Wireless G.
- Transfer speeds - even when connected via cable - are reallllllllly slooooooow. We're talking glacial recession speeds here, folks.
- Strange porting. The first reviewer noted this too - why put most of the ports on the FRONT of the unit? Silly and completely preventable. Again, Iomega must have rushed this baby out the door.

Well... very short. My home network was never able to even see this device. Judging from the flashing blue status light, it was stuck in an abnormal startup condition, one that I could not clear with reset or anything. After a few hours of troubleshooting attempts... product has been returned.