Iomega StorCenter Pro NAS 200r: competent, but uninspired

Iomega was one of the first companies to really grab consumers when it came to external storage with its famous Zip Disks. The years have moved on and Iomega is now a player in the consumer and enterprise storage markets. Its StorCenter Pro NAS 200r is a rack-mountable NAS with room for four SATA hard drives. Our test unit came with a full complement of 250GB Hitachi Deskstar drives. As small businesses move on from using "super desktops" as servers to running small server racks with dedicated hardware, we can see an expanding market for rack-mountable gear.

Having plugged the NAS 200r into our router and powered it up we noted that it was very noisy. The fans blow loud and hard. This further highlights that this is a product focussed on businesses and is designed to be housed in a rack and not on a desk.

Setting up the NAS 200r required that we ran a discovery utility. There are both Windows and Mac versions of the software. This interrogates your LAN to find the NAS. From that point, you can use Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection client to connect to the NAS 200r and run the Iomega Management Console within Windows Storage Server 2003.  The Iomega software is a Microsoft Management Console Snap-in that augments the Disk Management utility. In addition, the NAS ships with the Intel Matrix Storage Console for creating the RAID and configuring it. We rebuilt the supplied system as a RAID 5, meaning that we could sustain the loss of one drive from the array.

Indicator lights on the front panel of the NAS 200r indicate when the unit is working optimally or when the RAID array is being built or rebuilt. There's little danger of the power button being accidentally pressed as it's safely recessed and requires a pen to push in. Each drive caddy also has a pair of LEDs indicating the presence of a disk in a bay and its state.

Connected to a gigabit router, the NAS 200r was easily found by PCs and Macs on our test LAN. With the Iomega Discovery tool, you can easily map to a file-share on the NAS. Alternately, the NAS appeared almost instantly within Vista's network browser where we could see file shares.

RAID support is limited to 0, 5 and 10 and a small part, 10GB, of each drive is used for the operating system. As you'd expect, the drives are hot-swappable and are housed in tight fitting caddies. We had some difficulty extracting the left-most disk as it seemed to catch on the side of the unit. It's not a big deal but could be a little annoying if you're looking to swap a drive out of the array in a hurry.

Performance was excellent. File transfers to and from the array, configured as a RAID, were snappy. We copied a 350MB video file to the NAS 200r and played it simultaneously on two machines and then pulled a drive out of the array during playback. As far as we could tell, no frames were dropped and the array suffered no ill effects.

What's missing? In a perfect world, we'd like a NAS pitched at larger offices to have some further, built-in redundancy. Dual network interfaces would be nice as would a second power supply. However, such features are available in higher-end units.

The Iomega StorCenter Pro NAS 200r is a competent NAS. While unspectacular in some ways it sets out to deliver a storage solution for offices that have moved on from desktop units and have standard racks for their servers and other network gear.