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

[Eric Beversluis]

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. 

The Terastation is a multi-disk, RAID-capable NAS device which runs on a
Linux OS. (Interestingly, it does not directly support Linux boxes; only
Windows and Mac.) The HP Media Smart Server is a sweet little box with
room for four HDDs (it comes with one)--however it runs Windows Home
Server. (It would be interesting to know if there's a way to replace
that OS with a Linux OS.)

I recently purchased the Iomega Home Network Hard Drive. It too runs a
Linux OS but handles only FAT32 files. I bought the 500 GB version. In
addition to an Ethernet port, it has a USB port for directly connecting
to a computer.

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.

My first effort was to back up my old Sony XP Pro. While it functioned
fine, the speed was atrocious over an Ethernet cable connection with
basically nothing else using the network. It took 3hrs, 42 min to back
up 3.4 GB using ntbackup. At work over a similar (100 Mbps) Ethernet
link I can back up a 14GB Lotus Domino Server to a Terastation in about
45 minutes, using ntbackup. I also tried using the FTP capacity of the
Iomega to copy files from my daughter's old notebook. While somewhat
faster, it seemed excruciatingly slow.

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.
--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.