Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive

Most people reading GadgetNutz.com are going to have a home network. Broadband companies often include, or offer, routers as part of their internet packages. With game consoles using your home network, iPhones and other cellular devices using the network, you’re just naturally pushed into this technology almost without effort. Iomega with their Home Media Network Hard Drive are one of the companies offering an addon to your home network that you probably had no idea you needed. But you do need it and here’s why! The Home Media Network Hard Drive is ‘Network attached storage’ and while that sounds very technical, it is as simple as plugging the drive into your router. The drive can then be configured with an included CD that has an easy-to-use set up wizard; install the included Discovery software, and in just a few steps, you will have everything ready to go. Really. In this case if you just trust the software it’s going to set it up properly on your computers around your home every time.

Now one of the primary uses of this drive is to allow you to store all your important information in a centralized location, and access it from any computer on your network. Just think – no more wasting a CD just to move a few files from the laptop to the computer attached to the printer. With network storage, you simply store the files in one place, and anyone can access them without the hassle of a ‘sneakernet.’ External drives attached to your network can back up files from all of the computers in a home as well as do some neat tricks such as share printers and stream music and movies.

Iomega’s drive is also ideal for backing up multiple computers around your home onto a single device. Most of us forget to back up our computers – until it is too late. With shared network data storage, a single backup location will protect all of your data. Data backup is easy with Iomega home network devices. With just a few steps, Iomega’s Retrospect backup software will automatically back up your data so it is there when you need it. Even better you can simply keep your data stored on the drive to begin with. If your computer dies you just plug in a new computer and the data is still on the Iomega drive!

The one area where the Iomega drive stands about the rest of the crowd is in storing, managing, and accessing your multimedia files. After spending hours ripping gigabytes of CDs and DVDs, you want everyone in your household to have access your music and movies from any computer. Or at least you want to! Here’s where network storage comes in very handy – not only can you store all your multimedia in one convenient location, but the best home network storage devices out today include media server technology. When connected to a digital media adapter or player, media servers allow you to stream multimedia content on to your TV. Look for devices with Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) compatibility so you can use the media server on your Home network drive to play content on your game console. Iomega’s drive also supports streaming iTunes content as well. It plays equally well with Windows and Mac – for that matter it plays well with many portable WiFi-enabled devices as well!

Iomega’s network storage devices are based on cutting edge Linux NAS technology, and they offer additional features you would expect on a high-end server, like secured shares. This feature is even helpful for home networks, since you can decide which people on the network have access to specific folders. With secured shares, you can be sure that your teenager has a place to backup music, but can’t accidentally delete your tax records!

Iomega(r) home network hard drives offer an easy way to share printers and additional storage throughout your home network. Easily access all your data – especially your multimedia content — from any computer. Discovery tools make set-up a snap by automatically configuring your network hard drive to work with any computer on your network. With media server technology, you can stream videos to any computer or even your game console. Network attached storage is an easy way to backup and protect all computers on your network. With 500GB to 1TB of storage space, these network storage devices make it easy to make the most of your network.

I couldn’t recommend the Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive more. It’s literally a piece of technology that I never knew I couldn’t live without. We stream movies on uPnP enables devices like our Xbox 360 and stream music via iTunes to our AppleTV and with the third party addons for AppleTV we can also stream movies from the Iomega drive just as nicely.

This is far more than your usual external hard drive. The Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive manages itself and it can manage all of your home computer storage with almost no thought or effort on your part.

Highly recommended!

Written by Kermit