Review: Iomega Storcenter network attached storage

If you've got a home network and are fed up having to ensure a specific PC is turned on in order for other PCs to access documents and files, network attached storage (NAS) is the way to go.

Hooking directly up to your router, a NAS can be access by any PC on your network at any time. The Storcenter from Iomega has a further trick up its sleeve in that it's UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) compatible, which means it's able to communicate with other UPnP devices in your network.

In our test environment, we had a Pinnacle Showcenter 200 and, sure enough, the Storcenter was able to supply the Showcenter with video, audio and images without having to run Pinnacle's streaming software on a PC.

Sadly, the Showcenter has its own problems when it comes to wireless streaming - you can read more about our experiences in the Test Bed blog.

The Storcenter relies on an Ethernet connection instead of wireless, which makes sense since transferring large files over a standard wireless network running at around 15-20Mbits/sec can take a while.

This means unless you have an extra long Ethernet cable, you'll need to situate it near to your router. If you're desperate to make it wireless, you could add a wireless bridge.

We tried this during testing and although it worked, the speed drop was enough to prevent streaming wireless video.

If there's one area where the Storcenter falls down it's the noisy fan. Most of the time it runs without the fan switched on, but when it activates it's hard to ignore.

It also doesn't appear to depend on whether or not you're accessing the drive - many times during our testing period it would fire up when supposedly idle.

The web-based menu system is relatively easy to get the hang of and user accounts can be created complete with passwords.

Should you have a printer, you can hook it up to one of the two USB ports so it functions as a network printer.

The Storcenter is a neat little device and is reasonably priced, but the noisy fan is an irritation.

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