Storage Review: Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d

If you want to get serious about backing up your data, and small businesses should, Iomega's new StorCenter ix4-200d, a four-drive network attached storage (NAS) server, is certainly a serious piece of backup equipment.

The ix4-200d comes with big business features - backup software from storage giant EMC (Iomega's parent company), RAID configuration, Gigabit Ethernet, remote access, iSCSI support, etc. - but Iomega designed the desktop storage server for small offices with 50 or fewer employees. It also supports PC, Mac or Linux systems.

The ix4-200d comes with either 2, 4 or 8 terabytes (TB) of storage, and it sells for $700, $900 and $1,900, respectively. (We tested the 4TB model.) Should a drive fail, you can replace the installed drives with standard SATA drives of any capacity from any maker.

The Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d NAS server.

Reliable RAID

While even 2 TB is probably more than most small businesses will ever need, given the rate at which data volume keeps growing at many companies, you never know.

To put it in perspective, one terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes (GB). Few PCs ship with drives larger than 500GB - and few small business employees ever store anything close to that amount of business-related data.

Read the rest at SmallBusinessComputing.com.