One important feature of the Iomega is the ability to configure your iTunes library for sharing with the other computers on your network. Like the Western Digital My Book World Edition, it took the Iomega about 3 minutes, 15 seconds to copy a 1.43GB QuickTime video onto its hard drive. For perspective, it took about 58 seconds for the Iomega to complete our test of copying 100 photos, but over 2 minutes to transfer a 1GB photo. This shouldn’t be a deterrent desktop drives use different connections and are used for different purposes.
In our experience, home media servers produce slower transfer speeds than your average desktop drive. Though the Iomega server can be used as a storage unit for your entire network, it does not share the connectivity speeds of its non-networked cousins, the desktop hard drive. The Home Storage Web interface enables the user to easily reset the settings on the drive, check for updates, reset the media servers on the drive, and schedule tasks for the drive. The administrator can set who can access the folders with simple clicks of a button, and it’s also easy to set a folder for use with iTunes or DLNA media.
The Home Storage software interface allows you to manage the folders on the drive by populating the server with more folders and configuring them as you’d like. If you just want to access the files on the server, the Iomega appears as a network device, so you don’t need to use any of its software initially. You use Iomega’s desktop-based application to detect the drive, while the Web-based application configures the drive. A recent downloadable software fix enabled us to correct this issue. The server’s software interface is very intuitive and it has a useful set of controls, but initially, we had difficulty detecting the drive on our network. It connects to your network router via Ethernet. The Iomega’s compact grey curved block shape is about the size of a typical desktop hard drive and comes equipped with a USB 2.0 port to augment its storage capacity. You can even control what each user on the network can access. You can access files on the home media server through any computer (Mac or PC) on the network. According to Iomega documentation: "a slow steady blink may indicate a problem with the drive".Home media servers like Iomega’s Home Media Network Hard Drive are network-attached storage (NAS) devices that provide a centralized location on a network to store your videos, audios, and photos. To retrieve a disk, you must power-off and use the emergency eject hole. After the failed attempts to eject a disk, the drive activity enters a state of slow steady blinking. Listening very carefully, one can hear the mechanism try five times to eject. After pressing the eject button or using a software eject command, the drive tries to eject a disk.
It is possible for a Zip drive to stop ejecting disks. A drive affected with this problem has permanently failed.
After a couple failed attempts to recognise the media, the heads retract. The cycle of moving the heads over and then away from the platter makes a "click" sound. Unaffected by software commands, the drive will retract and re-engage the heads a few times, unable to recognise the media. A less common failure is where the drive can no longer eject a disk.Ī Zip drive may develop the "click of death" after a life of heavy use. The most common failure of Zip drives is known as the "click of death", where the drive no longer recognises disks. As Zip grew in popularity, production was largely moved to Malaysia, and it is possible that quality declined in a tradoff for increased production. Some models of Iomega Zip disk drives had high failure rates.