14 DAY TRIAL // Iomega Corporation, a hardware manufacturing company specialized in storage solutions and networking equipment announced the launch of a new line of network enabled storage systems that are designed for home use. According to the Iomega press release concerning the launch of the new line of products, these hard disk drives reset "benchmark for price-performance and easy-to-use network storage for the home".
The line of new Iomega network storage systems comes with several capacities like 320, 360 and 500GB, being specially designed to offer an increased level of performance and storage capabilities at a low cost, affordable for end users. In fact, the Iomega Home Network Hard Drives are priced only slightly higher than external hard disk drives of similar storage capacities. "Today, the most common use for home networks is to enable shared Internet access," said Tom Kampfer, president and COO, Iomega Corporation in the company's press release. "Families are struggling with how to organize data across multiple PCs. Shared network storage made easy and affordable with Iomega's new Home Network Hard Drive adds the benefit of securely sharing and consolidating photos, music and video over a home family network, as well as increasing storage and backup capacity. At less than $150.00, the Iomega Home Network Hard Drive is a new price-performance milestone for networking today's digital home."
All the home storage drives in the new Iomega product line are connected by the 10/100 Ethernet port, that is the most used networking standard in home networks. As each Iomega Home Network Hard Drive arrives with the necessary cable, setting up the storage is as simple as connecting the drive to an available port on a router or switch. The software installation is also very simple, on Windows running computers users only have to run the bundled Discovery Tool Home utility, while in the case of computers running a Linux distribution or an Apple machine, the manual configuration is also very simple. At the hardware level, all three Iomega Network Hard Drives are based on hard disk drives featuring the Serial ATA II interface and 7200rpm with a cache memory of 8MB. Apart for the 10/100 Ethernet port, each drive is also equipped with a high speed USB port for use with a single computer or for expanding the storage capabilities of the Iomega device by adding an external hard disk drive.
On the software department, Iomega bundles with the home network storage devices the easy to use back up software suite EMC Retrospect HD which allows users to perform automated backup of critical files. The Iomega system is compatible with all operating systems like Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional; XP Home /XP Professional /XP Professional x64; Windows Vista Home Basic /Home Premium /Business /Ultimate; Mac OS X 10.2.7 or higher; and Linux distributions including Redhat 9, Mandrake 10, Debian 3.0, Gentoo, and FedoraCore 3 and all hardware platforms as it only used general available connectivity standards like Ethernet and USB. The 320GB Iomega Home Network Hard Drive comes with a price tag of $149, while the 500GB version is priced at $199 and the 360Gb version of the network storage device is expected to cost around $149 too.