Iomega StorCenter ix2 review

The storage tab includes a number of critical features, such as tools for creating iSCSI targets and SMB shares, checking the status of external storage that you might have connected to the NAS’s USB port and switching the NAS from its default RAID 1 to a more capacious RAID 0 or JBOD drive configuration. Needless to say, we don’t recommend doing this if your data is even slightly critical, as you won’t be able to retrieve lost data without a mirrored drive.

The final tab dedicated to a specific class of features is the Network tab, where you can enable, disable and configure various file sharing options, including FTP, a WebDAV interface for web-based access to the NAS’s folders and SNMP monitoring of the NAS.

We tested the NAS’s speed using it as both an SMB share and an iSCSI target. An iSCSI target allows part of the NAS’s storage to be formatted and mounted by a single PC as though it’s a local drive. This can improve access speeds in some NAS devices because it offloads all processing tasks to the PC. It’s useful if you don’t need shared access to data.

The ix2 produced excellent iSCSI target tests. Our SMB throughput speed test achieved an overall large file average transfer speed of 31.2MB/s and a small file average of 12.1MB/s, with particularly poor write speeds of 8.5MB/s for large and 7.9MB/s for small files. However, mounting an iSCSI target gave us a large file average of 64.9MB/s, with fairly close read and write speeds, and a small file average throughput of 24.1MB/s.

The StorCenter ix2 is better looking than its predecessors, but unless it’s in standby mode the constant whirr of its hard disks can be rather irritating. However, a bit of hard disk noise is nowhere near as problematic as its slow SMB access speeds. At £265 (an average of 13p per gigabyte), we expect much better. The 4TB version of the Western Digital MyBook Live Duo is similarly priced, more capacious, fairly quick and very easy to use. Consider that instead.