Iomega Network Hard Drive Review

Watching all of your legally downloaded media is super easy with the Iomega. You just plug the 1 Terabyte drive into your router and stream the media to a gaming console, TV, or anything that's networked. But is the $185 price just right?

What You Need to Know

• When setting up, first connect the drive to your router with an Ethernet cord
• Then, power it up
• Third, install the software on a computer that is also connected to the same network (you don't have to do this, but it's just if you want to change options on the drive)
• You have to configure the drive to stream to iTunes or DLNA enabled devices, which is incredibly easy
• All you do is click the button next to the folder you want to stream from
• Then, if you wanted to watch something on your Xbox (which is DLNA), your Xbox automatically finds the drive and you can watch whatever you want
• The same thing applies to iTunes; all the music is available to any computer with iTunes and in our tests, it was supposed to be under the "shared" option, but we had to force import songs from the drive
• There are only two lights on the back that don't stay lit up, so it won't be bothering you in a dark room
• It does have a slight buzz when it's being heavily accessed, but it's not too noticeable
• The main snag you'll hit is that it takes some time to figure out which codecs are supported by each device playing the media, so maybe Iomega can streamline that aspect

Price

• $185
• One terabyte drives are about $120 on their own, so making it a media server for $65 more is totally worth it

Overall Rating

• 4 out of 5 Seals of Approval (how do we rate gadgets?)