![]() I had instant flashbacks to the click of death, the nasty sound Zip drives made before they crashed, resulting in a class action lawsuit against Iomega. I wouldn’t be so freaked out about this if Iomega wasn’t owned by EMC, one of the biggest, most reliable companies in the storage industry. I had no idea what the PX4 might be doing to the disks behind the scenes or whether I’d have any redundancy whatsoever. I sat there absolutely dumbfounded – this wasn’t a small bug, but a giant, ugly, monstrous bug. So I did what I do – I checked three boxes, chose RAID 10, and clicked Apply.Īs far as I know, there’s not a way to perform RAID 10 with 3 hard drives (it requires an even number of drives) but the PX4 happily started initializing the array. I take an evil satisfaction out of knowing somebody, somewhere didn’t test their code. I just like to find new ways to break ’em. I didn’t say I like to take things apart and put them back together – oh no. ![]() I need to stop here and tell you a little about myself: I like to break things. I’d missed the subtle little visual checkboxes inside each hard drive in the GUI, so… I picked RAID 10 and clicked Apply, but Iomega warned me that I hadn’t chosen any drives yet. I went into Drive Management, and sure enough, it offered a really easy GUI to configure RAID levels. The device could fetch its own firmware upgrades over the Internet, and yes, it was up-to-date. I tried.)įor the first minute or two, Iomega impressed the heck out of me. (No, that’s not my Iomega, and no, you can’t delete data. You can even test drive the Iomega StorCenter control panel online. Fire up a web browser, go to that address, and you’re going to be impressed with the user interface. After adding in drives and plugging it in electricity and Ethernet, the control panel displays the IP address it fetched from DHCP. The PX4-300d comes with the basics: power brick, one Ethernet cable, and the management tools CD. Pluggin’ in the N: Network Attached Storage iomega PX4-300d Control Panel It’s a fairly inexpensive way to get tiered storage, but with just 128GB in the fast pool, I’m not sure how useful this would be in practice. With VMware ESX/ESXi’s Storage vMotion, we can move virtual machines back and forth between the two RAID pools without taking the VM down for a reboot. This would allow two tiers of storage: a blazin’ fast SSD mirror, and a bigger/slower RAID 5 pool. PX6 users have 6 drives to choose from, so in that environment, it might make sense to go with four magnetic hard drives and two solid state drives. I wouldn’t recommend the 2TB drives for a reason that’ll be clear shortly. With those drives, RAID 5 would give me 9TB of usable storage, and the possibly-faster RAID 10 would give me 6TB. Storage pools in the PX4/PX6 have to all be the same size and speed, and I didn’t really need performance, so I chose to go with four of the Hitachi 3TB drives. Micron RealSSD C400 128GB solid state drive – $240.Choosing Drives and RAIDs for the PX4 and PX6Īs of this writing, the list of officially supported hard drives is pretty short: I wouldn’t recommend buying the versions that come populated with hard drives – if you ever need to replace the drives, you’re in for a rough time, and oddly, the bring-your-own-disk version doesn’t suffer from that issue. At around $700 from Amazon for the diskless version, I couldn’t resist. The full feature list is ridiculous – it’s absolutely everything I needed for my VMware lab and my backups. Quiet (31dBa max) and low power (based on an Intel Atom CPU and 2GB of RAM).Insane number of home media support options including BitTorrent downloading, Time Machine backups for Apples, Bluetooth, automatic uploads to Facebook/YouTube/Flickr, recording server for Axis/Panasonic/D-Link webcams.External USB3 drive support (for leftover USB hard drives).Cloud support – automatically copy files to Amazon S3, Mozy, or other Iomegas over the Internet.Official VMware ESX/ESXi, Hyper-V, Windows DFS compatibility.iSCSI server with 2 network ports, jumbo frame support, VLANs.Available empty (so you can bring your own drives, including SSDs).Network attached storage device with 4 or 6 hot-swappable drive bays.I wanted to love this monster from the moment I read the spec sheets: Iomega StorCenter PX4-300d NAS
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