Iomega StorCenter px6-300d review

Iomega's StorCenter px6-300d is the company's first desktop NAS appliance to use an Atom processor and support RAID 6. It claims to provide every network storage facility an SMB could need and in this review Dave Mitchell finds out if its performance is as compelling as its features.

IT Pro Verdict

The StorCenter px6-300d is comparatively good value and has an impressive range of network storage features. Backup tools are particularly good, Iomega’s Personal Cloud provides easily configured, secure remote access and the appliance returned some respectable speeds in our performance tests.

By Dave Mitchell

published 5 October 2011

in Reviews

The Storage Manager utility simplifies installation as it finds the appliance on the network, maps all the predefined shares to drive letters for you and provides quick access to the appliance's web console. For drive configuration you can create multiple storage pools and RAID protected volumes, but for testing we opted to configure all the drives in a single RAID 6 array.

The Copy Job feature is a handy backup tool as it schedules copies of folders from one network device to another and neither the source nor the destination has to be the appliance itself. The appliance also supports the Mac OS X Time Machine service and can be replicated using Rsync to another remote unit.

Iomega&rsquo;s Personal Cloud requires a port forwarding rule added to your router, but it is easy to use giving secure remote acce — Iomega’s Personal Cloud requires a port forwarding rule added to your router, but it is easy to use giving secure remote acce

The Personal Cloud feature provides secure data backup and file sharing to remote users.

Even a quick glance at the web interface shows Iomega has been very busy. Cloud services are a high priority with options for the Amazon S3 and EMC MozyPro hosted backup services.

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Iomega's Personal Cloud feature provides secure data backup and file sharing to remote users as though they were on the same LAN. We first looked at this feature in our review of Iomega's px4-300r rack-mounted appliance and found it very easy to use and capable of providing simple and secure remote access to the appliance's resources.

The latest firmware upgrade includes EMC's Avamar client which is aimed at larger businesses deploying the appliance in remote and branch offices. Enabling this feature starts the Avamar client on the appliance which deduplicates data at source during a backup and sends it to a central Avamar data store.

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Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.