Iomega StorCenter px12-450r review

Crammed full of features and packing Intel’s heavy duty Ivy Bridge Xeon processor, this is Iomega's fastest storage appliance yet.

IT Pro Verdict

The StorCenter px12-450r is undeniably fast over Gigabit and its low price makes it a good choice as a central backup system for SMBs. Storage can’t be expanded outside the box and it lacks USB 3 and eSATA port, but it does offer plenty of backup tools and good support for cloud services.

Reasons to buy
  • +

    Excellent performance; Good Value; Easy deployment; Integral McAfee anti-virus

Reasons to avoid
  • -

    External expansion shelves not supported; Slow Rsync speeds; No USB3 and eSATA ports

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For general NAS and IP SAN operations, Iomega's firmware tweaks have paid off as this system is fast. Using a Dell PowerEdge R515 server loaded with Windows Server 2012, we saw drag and drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip return read and write speeds of 103MB/sec.

FTP operations were slightly faster with Filezilla reporting upload and download rates over Gigabit of 107MB/sec. Even our small file copy test didn't flummox it with the 22.4GB test sample of 10,500 files copied to the appliance at a speedy 72MB/sec. IP SAN speeds are also up to the limits of Gigabit with Iometer reporting fast 113MB/sec read and write rates for a 500GB target.

SecureMind provides IP camera surveillance and includes scheduled recording and motion detection

Surveillance and anti-virus features

Surveillance features have been improved as Iomega has replaced its own software with the SecureMind Surveillance Manager. Along with support for a lot more IP cameras, it adds features such as motion detection triggers but you only get one camera license included with an extra four-pack costing around 110.

Virus scanning is also new and comes courtesy of McAfee's VirusScan Enterprise for Linux. It has its own management console where you can view the proceedings, configure real-time scanning and create on-demand scans for selected shares.

Conclusion

The StorCenter px12-450r comes up short on features when compared with Netgear's ZFS powered ReadyData 5200 as this offers deduplication, iSCSI thin provisioning, SSD caching and support for two external expansion shelves. However, the StorCenter is well suited to SMBs as a central backup system as it's good value and the new hardware specification delivered impressive speeds in our real world throughput tests.

Verdict

The StorCenter px12-450r is undeniably fast over Gigabit and its low price makes it a good choice as a central backup system for SMBs. Storage can’t be expanded outside the box and it lacks USB 3 and eSATA port, but it does offer plenty of backup tools and good support for cloud services.

Chassis: 2U rack

CPU: 2.5GHz E3-1265LV2 Xeon

Memory: 8GB DDR3

Storage: 12 x hot-swap SATA drive bays

Drives included: 4 x 2TB Hitachi UltraStar SATA

Array support: RAID0, 1, 5, 6, 10, JBOD

Network: 4 x Gigabit

Other ports: 3 x USB2

Expansion: 2 x PCI-e

Power: 2 x 550W hot-plug PSUs

Management: Web browser

Software: Iomega Storage Manager and QuikProtect

Warranty: 3yr RTB

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

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.

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