[KLUG Members] product review: Iomega home network hard drive

[Peter Bart]

On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 07:58 -0400, Eric Beversluis wrote:
> The market is beginning to see some specialized NAS (Network Attached
> Storage) devices designed for home use, including the Terastation, the
> HP Media Smart Server, and the Iomega Home Network Hard Drive. 
> 

	I'm looking at something like the Simpletech 500GB SimpleDrive USB 2.0.
It's getting really confusing for me though. I have options to have a
firewire, eSATA interfaces. I'll be using this to back up notebook
drives, much like yourself? The specific one that caught my eye was this
one <http://www.simpletech.com/parts/spu35500.htm>, because it's on sale
for $120.00. Then I saw all the other options and just because it's on
sale doesn't make it a good deal. I think these are not really NAS
devices, just external hd's?


> 
> I was looking primarily for network backup rather than file sharing. The
> drive's choice of FAT32 is based on providing file-sharing for Windows,
> Mac and Linux users on the network.  For backup, I'd like to have native
> partitions for each OS.

	Same here, I have only Linux notebooks. some have XP installed in
VMWare.

> 
> The Iomega instructions indicate that one can reformat the drive but
> that it then will not work as a network storage device. Rising to that
> challenge, I did the following, using the USB port:
> --Using gparted I shrank the original HDD to about 50 GB.
> --Still with gparted I then created three new partitions, NTFS,
> un-formatted, and ext3.
> --Then with an iBook I formatted the un-formatted partition to HFS+.
> (Gparted only gives an HFS format option.)
> 
> With this setup 
> --I'm able to write to each partition from the appropriate OS, using USB
> with seeming good speed. I created a disk image of a 32GB iBook in about
> 45 minutes.

	What did you use to write? I've used rsync to transfer from one
notebook to another but that needs server and client so it's out for an
NAS? I'm looking at documentation for NFS as well.


> --I still have LAN access to the original (now shrunken) FAT32 partition
> and the data that was stored on it before re-partitioning (which I had
> backed up to another HDD just in case).
> --I don't know if I'm going to be able to access the other partitions
> via the LAN. I suspect that the Iomega OS is highly specialized and
> stripped down and thus seeing anything beyond its own FAT32 partition is
> beyond it.

	The Iomega has the ethernet port, anything I've seen so far does not.
Should I look for something that does have an ethernet port? Eventually
I will have a desktop box that will be used to run IP Cop maybe Squid,
and maybe have a raid for backups? Both my critical notebooks are new so
I'm not expecting any failures anytime soon. As a stop gap I'm
burning /home as well as the hidden files to DVD right now. Should I
maybe bite the bullet and get this "server" going?

Best Regards,
-- 
Peter Bart <peter at petertheplumber.net>
http://petertheplumber.net