warnings about iomega network drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter Alan Wright
  • Start date Start date
A

Alan Wright

I bought one (250gb), as it seemed like the ideal way to
backup my several computers. You just attach this drive
to your ethernet router, and all computers can get access.
However, this product has numerous problems:

1. Norton Ghost is provided with the drive, but cannot
work with the network drive because there are no
DOS drivers for this product. Ghost may work if
the drive is connected to onbe computer via USB,
but this defeats the purpose.

2. Only one computer on the network at a time can have
control of the device (i.e. write access), so automatic
backups cannot actually work for multiple machines.
Manual backups will work if the computer in question
has write access to the drive, but any other computer
that currently has it must relinquish such access first
(user interaction required).

3. Network drive access barely works over a wireless
connection, too slow and problematic for actual use.

4. The drivers sometimes misbehave on bootup on a
machine which had access to the drive before the
reboot. It appears that to be safe, the drive should
be disabled on any machine which is rebooted.

5. Disabling the drive sometimes fails or is very slow.

All in all, I would say this technology barely works in
limited ways, and is not ready to be considered a real
product as yet.

Alan
 
Some more notes about this:

Over a week of using this thing I found that the drivers
had problems starting up and would prevent systems
from booting properly. This was the last straw, so I
have now returned the drive.

IMHO, no one should buy this product.

Alan
 
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