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Lifehacker
Iomega's Home Media Network Hard Drive comes in 500GB and 1TB packages for $US160/$US230 respectively--a good look, especially when considering the drive's AFP/SMB support, UPnP/iTunes servers and Gigabit Ethernet.
EMC bought Iomega so that it could start easing its business-grade storage gear into homes and small offices, and the StorCenter ix2 is the first official combo of Iomega brand and EMC juice. Before I get into its LifeLine Linux environment, I wanted to point out that this thing is priced to move: A full two-disk 1TB NAS costs $US300—and you can double it to 2TB for $US480. I know HDD prices are dropping but that's a pretty good deal to me. Here's what you get with the storage:
Who doesn't love a Zip drive? With their sweet 100MB of magnetic memory, they used to save my arse back in the day. (My Performa 6400 even had an internal Zip drive.) And who doesn't love a marionette? With their beady eyes and history of horror-film animation, they touch the heart of any child from 1 to 100, sometimes with a knife. Put the two together, and what do you get?
The Gadget: The Iomega ScreenPlay HD upscaling multimedia drive, a 500GB HDD for playing movies, music, and slideshows on your TV set.
Sure we'd all love to see the little bus-powered 2.5" Iomega eGo drives hit 1TB, but that's not happening today. Instead, Iomega is porting their sleek, shiny, colourful design to the 3.5" realm, launching 1-terabyte Super eGo (get it?) drives in blue, red and black. For the time being, they're only USB 2.0—no FireWire or eSATA options—you still need a power supply, and we're gonna guess that they're spinning at 5400rpm. The good news is that they'll cost just US$270, not bad for a hefty TB.
The people who brought you the camouflage eGo portable USB hard drive have traded the hunting rifle for the meerschaum pipe: the leather-clad 250GB eGo, which goes on sale today for just over US$140, will look good in any study, but best in ones where there's a roaring fire and many leather-bound books. Iomega takes pains to note that this is the only leather portable drive on the market. Our guess is that, as stylish as it is, it may remain so for a while. (Second photo after the jump.) [Iomega]
Iomega's new Screenplay HD Multimedia drive promises that you can "leave the PC behind" since it stores your movies, pics and tunes and connects directly to your HDTV. You simply save them via the USB2.0 connection, and it's standalone from there on. It can upscale to to 720p and 1080i, plays a wide bunch of formats and connects via HDMI, SCART, composite audio and video or coaxial S/PDIF. With 500GB inside it should be able to store about 750 hours of MPEG2 at 780 x 480 pixels: that's around 500 movies. It's available now for US$218.45. [Iomega and TFTS]
We just heard that Iomega was icing its plan to release HomeCenter, a Windows Home Server product like the ones currently available from HP. The company stresses that this decision has "nothing to do with the bug" that's been corrupting data saved directly to WHS systems from certain applications. Instead, Iomega felt that the high cost of the device itself, essentially a PC, was prohibitively unprofitable at the moment. Iomega naturally wants to look good, as it's in talks to be acquired by EMC. But there weren't many recognisable names in the initial WHS launch list to begin with—if nobody wants to build these home servers for a mass market, how long can the product survive? [Windows Home Server on Giz]
Mac users love giant local storage drives, and Iomega knows it, designing the UltraMax Mac Pro-inspired baby HDD towers to accompany the heaviest machinery out of Cupertino. The latest edition is the one on the far left, the single-drive UltraMax Desktop Hard Drive, with one eSATA, two FireWire 800, one FireWire 400 and one USB 2.0 port. The 750GB costs just $319.95; the 500GB costs $219.95. There's also a dual-interface 500GB UltraMax Desktop Hard Drive with just regular FireWire and USB 2.0 for $189.95. The lot will be available in October.
This morning, Iomega pushes hard to make network-attached storage more common in the home by launching a couple of Ethernet-equipped drives that are priced close to their USB-only siblings. There's a 320GB drive that lists for $149, and a 500GB drive going for $199. (A 360GB version should be available next month for $149 as well.) These may not be the very best deals out there, but they're definitely in the running.
