Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-200d 8 TB (4 X 2 TB) Network Attached Storage Server 34563

********************************* UPDATE*********************************So my prediction sadly came to fruition. I ran a vSphere lab on this thing, and this morning one drive failed. "No problem," I thought. I pulled and reseated the drive to see the drive had actually failed. To my delight, it recognized the drive and started the long and laborious process of "Rebuilding Data Protection." Fine. When I return from work, I find the warning that "The Iomega StorCenter device failed and some data loss may have occurred." All 4 of my disks are showing up as foreign. The BEST part about it is that I called Iomega to find out that the warranty only lasts a year - after which point, they WON'T EVEN GIVE YOU PHONE SUPPORT WITHOUT A $50/INCIDENT FEE.In summation, I wish that I could give this product less than a 1-star rating. It will be the last product that I ever purchase from Iomega; this has honestly been the worst experience I can remember having with not only product, but a company. For the ~$850 I spent on this thing, it was unsuitable for even backup data, and against my better judgement I used it for a lab and lost my 10-12 VMs. And, because I purchased this over-priced paperweight more than 12 agonizing months ago, I cannot even get someone on the phone without paying $50 to tell me that I have to find some data recovery tools/service. Wonderful. You stay classy Iomega.********************************* /UPDATE*********************************I heard about this product after listening to a roundtable discussion after one of the storage conventions. This was reviewed as being a pretty handy little storage unit to run some VMware labs, and other applications that can take advantage of network storage, but don't need exceedingly high performance storage. As I was listening to the discussion of affordable NAS/iSCSI, a great number of ideas popped into my head about how I could implement this into small business networks for backing VMs, etc. A few days later, I ordered one to test out. The results were not good.When I reveived the unit, it was in great shape, no visible distress to the box or shipping material. The unit powered on, I started to configure the system, and after restarting to apply changes, one of the drives failed. I thought, OK these things happen. HDDs come DOA every once in a while. I spoke to tech support, and the staff was extremely nice, curteous and attentive. They opted to send me an entirely new unit, as opposed to replacing the HDD. They sent me a second unit (which arrived quite promptly), and it did the EXACT SAME THING.Whether it's a complete fluke or not, I think that it would be a lapse in judgement for me to put any important data on one of these devices after the experiences that I've had with them. I am not sure if it's just the HDDs in the units, or the RAID controller, or what. I've had two units thus far, and neither of them have had all 4 disks (in default RAID 5) working at the same time. I am now waiting on a 3rd to arrive, but the bottom line is that I can't trust this device in the capacity for which it was purchased.All I was looking for was a NAS/iSCSI device with mediocre I/O, and reliable performance. The iomega ix4-200d did not live up to that task, and now I am wondering what I am going to do with it. I definitely won't put any critical business data on it, or home data that has personal value. I may use it for a VMware lab, but it's of little value there as well, because labs usually fall into that area where the VMs are not important enough to be backed up, but are still a pain if they're lost. Not a good combination for what I see as an unstable storage backend.

Purchased the 2TB version of this device 6 months ago.I immediately replaced all of the drives with 2TB drives (WD Caviar Green WD20EARS) to get the raw capacity up to 8TB. Have been using the 500GB drives (Seagate Barracuda LP ST3500412AS) the unit came with in various computers and haven't had any problems with them.Replacing the drives wasn't as easy as I hoped it would be, I tried replacing them all at once but it didn't like that so I replaced one at a time and it rebuilt the array each time. After swapping out the last drive it then recognized the 8TB and all was well. For good measure I then told it to reinitialize the entire array (as RAID5) before putting any data on it. Because of the rebuild times (many hours) you have to be patient but the result is that I have the 8TB unit with good quality HDs for substantially less than Iomega wants for the 8TB unit. It may be possible to change the drives faster by changing RAID levels before swapping out drives but I'm not patient enough to test out such theories.I also replaced the fan (its a standard 92mm case fan) for a quieter one.If you're worried about voiding warranties or aren't sure which end of a screwdriver to hold, then modding the unit probably isn't for you.The unit has been rock solid. Its primarily used for storing and streaming media using CIFS and AFP. Time Machine has no problem making backups on the device. The web management page is straight forward and easy to use. Being able to monitor the device via SNMP is also nice.I'm using the same firmware the device came with (2.1.9.46472) and since I haven't had any problems don't see a reason to update to the latest version (2.1.30.10908 at the moment).The only problem I've run into so far is trying to have the unit be media server. With both UPnP and iTunes haven't had any luck getting it to work reliably. I've never had any success getting UPnP to work reliably for any server/client paring so I didn't have any expectations that it was going to work in the first place.

I purchased this despite some not-so-stellar reviews here.I'm glad I did.The unit (at least for me) did not take long to intialise. The drives are in a RAID5 configuration and have not failed yet (because of some of the comments here, I have been checking the drives occasionally). I even accidentally unplugged the power once, and everything came back up fine !!I only use one of the features - as an iSCSI drive. For that, it works just fine. It is connected to a Windows 7 computer, which had no trouble connecting to it as an iSCSI drive.Been a few months now. So far, so good.Minus one star - because one cannot create iSCSI LUNs greater than 2 TB. And speed is nothing to write home about - but at this price point, I didn't expect it to be.