Company News;Internet;Personal Technology;Consumer Electronics;Technology Iomega's Storcenter: Storage Made Simple Digital packrats, rejoice. There's a decent tool for housing data on your home PC network, and it'll do other tricks, too Technology Product Review By Arik Hesseldahl Try as I might, I never seem to have enough storage space. In the old days I bought big boxes of floppy disks. Soon I graduated to the Zip drive, and bought box after box of 100-megabyte disks. Then came the Jaz cartridge, an unwieldy but effective cartridge that stored a gigabyte and later two on a single removable cartridge. <leadin>HIGH ANXIETY.</leadin> Now I buy a lot of external USB and Firewire drives for my Apple (<ticker>AAPL</ticker>) Macs and PCs running Microsoft's (<ticker>MSFT</ticker>) Windows. Chalk it up to an ever-growing library of digital music and video, coupled with a tendency to be a digital packrat, and an obsessive compulsion to make redundant backups. All that, compounded by a fear that hard drives can -- and on occasion do -- fail, has caused me to fill up more than my fair share of drives, both internal and external. In fact, I had just reached the point where I needed to find a replacement for my current external hard drive when I came across the Storcenter, from Iomega (<ticker>IOM</ticker>), the company behind the aforementioned Zip and Jaz drives. The Storcenter is part of a growing class of consumer-level storage products. These attach not directly to your home PC, but to your network. Therefore, they are accessible by all the connected computers. <leadin>BACKUP SOLUTION. </leadin>This can be especially useful if you have one big desktop PC, and then one or more notebook PCs that travel with you and need occasional backup. My home network is pretty simple. I have a DSL line into the apartment that connects to an Apple Airport wireless router. Connected to that, I have a Netgear (<ticker>NTGR</ticker>) switch that converts the one Ethernet port on the Airport to five. After installing some software on all the Macs and PCs on the network, I plugged the black Storcenter with 250 gigabytes worth of capacity into the switch using an included Ethernet cable. The 250-GB unit sells for about $290, and the 160-GB version goes for about $200. By the way, it also supports Linux. The next step was to launch the software application that "finds" the drive. On a Mac, it makes the drive show up on the desktop. On a Windows PC it showed in the "network places" directory. <leadin>WHAT A DRAG.</leadin> My first task was to move my collection of digital pictures from iPhoto on my Powerbook directly to the Storcenter drive. Doing it was no different than on any other drive: Drag the folder with the pictures in to the drive’s icon on the Mac desktop. The iPhoto library was 965 megabytes and it copied over to the Storcenter in about three minutes. Next, I decided it was time to backup the various songs I have on iTunes on my Powerbook, and then make them available to the iTunes library on to my PowerMac G4. Here the task was a somewhat bigger -- I moved nearly nine gigabytes worth of digital music to the Storcenter in less than 20 minutes -- and then imported them to iTunes on the Powermac directly from the Storcenter. It was actually convenient to have a common drive sitting between both machines. Of course, there's no difficulty sharing drives between computers over a network -- backing up what's on the laptop to the desktop, for instance. But having a handy middle ground between them has its merits. <leadin>SLOWING TO A CRAWL.</leadin> The Storcenter can do a lot more than just back up files. It has two USB ports on the back, which, among other things, can be used to share a printer over a network. It can also work as a media server if you have a media adapter for your home entertainment system. The downside in its behavior was that it occasionally slowed to a crawl when on large file transfers. A few times when moving a gigabyte or more of data all at once, the transfer rate dropped considerably. At this, I found it helped to stop the transfer, eject the drive by putting it in the trash, and then running the setup software again, then starting the transfer again, where I left off. This took little more than minute, but was annoying. Another strange behavior I saw was that the Storcenter wouldn't accept certain filnames from my iPhoto library. I had a few photos that for whatever reason had asterisks or other atypical symbols within their filenames. When I tried to drag the iPhoto library from my PowerMac G4 to the Storcenter, I got an error message saying that certain files could not be copied because of their names. This touched off a furious search to fine and rename the offending files -- which had been causing no trouble before this -- without the offending characters so they could copy normally. That was a pain. <leadin>SERIOUS STORAGE.</leadin> As home PC users build ever more sophisticated networks for all the computers they own and all the digital media they consume, these network-attached storage devices are going to become a lot bigger, less expensive, and much more common. Other companies are getting serious about this kind of storage. Last year, Seagate (<ticker>STX</ticker>) acquired a company called Mirra that makes network storage servers for the home that come in capacities as high as 400 GB. Netgear, Western Digital, and Buffalo Technology all make competitive products as well. With networks getting easier to create and storage getting cheaper, obsessive digital packrats like me may soon be able to rest easy -- and save more stuff. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2006/tc20060501_802397.htm http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/01/0109_valley_girl/index_01.htm,http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2008/tc2008014_155055.htm,http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2008/tc2008016_825385.htm False