iomega Home Media Server

Now this is a useful device. The iomeaga Home Media Network Hard drive. It gives you 1 TByte of online storage that you can use at home. I’ve played with network storage devices before and found them quite useful. This is a bit more than just an online filestore though. It supports Apple Time Machine, so you can use it to back up your Mac. It also works as an iTunes and DLNA server, so that you can steam media to your Playstation or Xbox (or any other device including some TVs).

Finally it has things called Active Folders which are places you can lob files for background processing. One active folder will work with Bit Torrent, another sends files to your Flickr account and third will resize pictures placed into it. There are also ones to display slide shows to web browsers. I’ve used it with Macs and PCs and it seems to work fine once you have got the latest versions of the client programs on your machines. I’ve not tried the Active Folders much yet, I’m particularly interested in the Flickr uploader though. It also does network printing (which I must get around to).

If you are looking for a lot of storage that you can share around the house, or are looking at all the files you have spread around the place and wondering how to organise them, or you want to steam media to your consoles, then this is worth looking at. Particularly as from a price point of view it is only slightly more expensive than a USB hard drive of similar capacity. The best place to get them from in Hull is Staples, who have them at a very attractive 100 pounds at the moment.