I'm in IT and have bought 6 of these so far. 2 for me and 4 for the company.
For the business, the iSCSI targets are great for backups and virtualization.
For home the SMB and FTP functionality is very useful. I put my movies on it and the built-in media server will stream right to my PS3! It will do your torrent downloads for you but I haven't taken advantage of that yet.
I replaced a home built file server with one of three units and so far I've not regretted it. It even recognizes my UPS through the USB port so it can do a graceful shut down during power failure.
The only reason I don't give it 5 starts is the performance isn't fantastic at times, and the web interface could use improvement. I don't like how much effort is involved with turning off unnecessary features and clearing unnecessary shares that it comes with.
A few days ago, I was attracted to the dark side of my basement by a weird sound. Walking in, I noticed my old ix2 had a red light on it. I had been having issues with the management software, but I knew it was a failed drive on a unit out of warranty, so replacing the drive would be almost 200 bucks. My old unit took two RMAs to get a working unit, so I was nervous about buying a new Iomega, especially since parent company EMC is selling the unit to Lenovo. On the other hand, the price is amazing for a unit that also will support scsi-3 pr.
The new unit was up and running in no time. The old management interfaces are gone, now managed through an integrated web server. There are many great features like a media server that will consolidate other ones on your network. In addition, there is integration for Mozy, Amazon AWS, and EMC Atmos. All in all, it's a solid little box, and after the issues getting the old one to initially work it's been rock solid for 5 years.
Migrating data was easy, I used Microsoft Synctoy on my windows workstation. Unlike the old ix2, this new one is 100% timecapsule compatible, so I easily set up my wife's laptop to backup to the new ix2.
I have not really used the cloud stuff, but I could not get the iphone App to detect the device. This appears to be a common complaint.
Really, I only use it to backup my media and allow my wife access to it. For this, the device is 100% fine. They have appeared to have fixed quality control issues in earlier units, and it's easier to manage and use than previous models. With my experience so far, I will even start to recommend them again.
Buy Iomega 35553 StorCenter IX2 2 bay 6TB (2x3TB) Network Storage Now
After much frobbing, the NAS portion of this seems to be working okay. This is not a plug and play device.
Mac / Time Machine: unless you work hard to set things up manually, time machine will by default use all
available space on a volume before it starts deleting old backups. There is no way to partition the nas to
restrict a share to a set amount of space. I had to manually create a mac sparsebundle of a max size in
order to keep time machine backups to a reasonable amount of space.
twonky media server: this is utter garbage. It barely works on the internal nas. It does not work
at all from the internet: external IP's are remapped to internal lan IP's (which of course are not
visible externally)
plugging in a printer to the usb port: my macs can see the printer, but get nothing but an assortment
of errors trying to print to it. After many hours of debugging, gave up on this one.
personal cloud: you can get to documents, but that's it. I've never been able to get to mp3 or mp4
files. m4a files appear to be completely unsupported.
mounting as an afp fs on my macs works ok
mounting as NFS on my mac does not work. Spent quite a while trying to bug this (so far,
unsuccessfully)
iomega support has been completely unresponsivethey have answered none of my queries.
In short, is provides network storage, and nothing else. The other features advertised do not
work.
I wold not recommend this box to anyone who is not comfortable hacking on a linux box
to fix whatever goes wrong... That said, it is much cheaper than competing 2-bay NAS
solutions offered by netgear and friends. If you need a plug-and-play solution, you need
to pay more and get something that has actually been debugged, and is supported by the
vendor.
My primary need is for NAS storage: I will keep it, as it is the cheapest solution I have found
for that. I give it two stars, because the advertised features simply do not work, and the
advertised support is non-existant. Two stars feels a bit generous, given that it doesn't do
what it claims to do.
Read Best Reviews of Iomega 35553 StorCenter IX2 2 bay 6TB (2x3TB) Network Storage Here
We tested our Iomega IX2 for last couple weeks, this little storage server NAS is really great but there is a lot of potential for furtehr software updates specially teh Apps area that can be downlaoded and insatlled as a service on the NAS. As of today there are only few services that work with this protocolar unit, for example there is no MySQL version for IX2 but there is for some other models, you need to be careful when purchasing which model would best suite your needs. On a very positive note, Iomega IX2 is very fast and reliable, we purchased it for a purpose of placing home videos on a DLNA server and using it to access movies of our kids and family. Up until today those movies ware just sitting in the online storage and we didn't have a easy way to access them and watch them. In combination with most Smart TVs and/or Network Media Player that is connected to your TV all content on the Iomega becomes rather accessible. Overall this NAS is solidly built and its quite robust for such a small footprint. Its virtually silent and small so it can sit in a family room on the shelf without being noticeable. The fact that content is redundantly mirrored to both hardrives would put your mind to ease as your content is safer then depending only on one hardrive. However I still recommend that you backup perhaps on the Cloud as a secondary backup place specially if you will be storing irreplaceable family movies and photos.
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I got this NAS as I wanted something to put my medias safely. Also got it on sale for $78 somewhere else so I thought great!
For the price you get a Marvell 1.6GHz CPU which supports 2*3TB, yeah!
So I played with it and compared it with the DNS-325 that I also have. I was a bit disappointed of the StorCenter ix2-dl as I thought it would have been an upgrade from the DNS-325. It wasn't.
The specs are great but don't really show in reality, even with the latest firmware. After a week of playing with it and contacted support as my transfer speed wasn't really good and steady, I returned it for a full refund.
PROS:
1.6GHz CPU
2*3TB support
Firmware has a bunch of features, I liked the iSCSI target
Certified ESX and CITRIX for iSCSI
Setting up backup with rsync is easy
CONS:
Runs hot (I was hitting 91C during file transfer on the CPU, 61C idle, 68 for the motherboard all with lead opened)
Speed varies too much (from 2MB/s to 60MB/s even on files > 10GB)
Hard drive compatible list is limited
Support don't know much about the product
Cannot configure the unit with no drives
RAID 1 kicks in automatically when 2 drives are inserted
No JBOD support
Cache is off by default
Drives get warm to the touch quickly
All in all it could be your first NAS box as it has a lot of features and is easy to set up however if you want speed you might want to look somewhere else. Although I may have got a bad unit, hence the 3 stars and not 1, I didn't risk to give it another shot as I already have spent more time than necessary.
UPDATE 06-16-2013
-----------------
Well, recently it was on sale for $55 shipped... so I decided to give it another shot. I upgraded the firmware to the latest and it seems like things got a bit better.
I can now write on a RAID 1 setup up to 44MB/s and read up to 84MB/s which is way better for what I got in the first unit (which was more like 34R/34W).
I checked the temperatures though and I still reach 93C for the CPU and around 68C for the motherboard. Drives get up to 45C inside.
Because I decided to keep this one due to its much better read/write performance, I started to tweak the fan. I added a 3 pins splitter which gets rid of the WPM functionality and was able to fit another fan inside but on top of the HDD. Also, I put a little chipset heatsink on the CPU to help out (which drop the temp by 10C). Both run full speed now and I don't mind as it is still fairly quiet.
My temps after mod:
idle: 60C for the CPU and 48C for the motherboard
load: 74C for the CPU and 54C for the motherboard
This is with the front cover closed! Also the drives seem to stay cold to the touch.
Drawback:
As the PWM doesn't control the fan, I get 'Internal Fan' is not functioning and a blinking red light however I don't mind as I prefer to keep my system cool.
All in all I am adding another star to this unit (switch from 3 to 4) and hope future firmware will allow you to control fan speed and acknowledge errors to clear the blinking light.
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A little bigger than I thought it would be, but that's ok because it has compartments that hold a lot of stuff. Quality of workmanship is superb, very lightweight but tough, and will easily fit a 10" tablet with room to spare. One compartment even has some stylus/pen holders. This, for me, is the perfect carrying case for protecting my 10" tablet. This item shipped to me via UPS that was handed off to USPS, so tracking got weird for a while, but it still came a day earlier than expected.
