Home Network Storage Problem Solved (Hopefully!)

Over the weekend I discovered what was eating up most of my hard drive space and a few people made some suggestions via the comments here and also on Facebook.

I didn’t realise that a lot of network storage devices supported iTunes (and similar), so I hadn’t done much research into my options.

Based on what people were saying I went off and found that Iomega had several devices that could probably do what I wanted. Some people have had issues with Iomega hardware, but I’ve never had any. In fact I have very fond memories of Iomega’s customer service years ago when I had issues with a Zip drive (remember them?).

Iomega have a very broad range of storage solutions, but they’ve got some devices that are aimed at the “home network” and among them is the “Iomega® Home Media Network Hard Drive, Cloud Edition“. Bit of a mouthful, but the feature list is damn impressive, with support for pretty much everything I could imagine – and more. It comes in three different capacities 1, 2 and 3 TB, so I naturally went for the biggest one.

Checking the pricing online I originally thought that buying direct from Iomega was going to be the cheapest option, as their direct pricing is significantly cheaper than most of their resellers. However, for some odd reason, Amazon UK worked out quite a bit cheaper – even when I opted for express delivery. Hopefully I’ll be taking delivery of my new “toy” in the next day or so! (Amazon expect to deliver it tomorrow)

What’s it got?

Pretty much everything you could think of and then some.

You can get a full list of the features here, but basically it’ll do all the storage for all the Mac computers in the house (desktops and laptops) while also supporting media streaming, remote backups and a lot more.  It’s got a builtin media server and also supports automatic uploading of photos to various social media sites including Facebook and Flickr. The web interface to control the entire thing looks pretty slick and I’m looking forward to exploring its features, though I know I’ll only use a small fraction of them.