Iomega StorCenter px4-300r review

Iomega claims its latest rack mount NAS appliance claims an improved performance and introduces SMBs to its Personal Cloud feature. Dave Mitchell thinks it's expensive though and in this review finds out whether Iomega can justify its high price tag.

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Iomega doesn't include any backup software, but you do have the Copy Job feature. This allows folders on selected workstations to be regularly copied to the appliance or you can use it to copy data from the appliance to another Rsync server. When the QuikTransfer button on the appliance is pressed it'll copy anything on an inserted USB device to a folder on the appliance. You can also tie it in with Copy Jobs that will be fired up when it's pressed.

The px4-300r fared reasonably well in our real world performance tests. Drag and drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip using a Dell PowerEdge R515 with Server 2008 R2 64-bit loaded returned read and write speeds of 103MB/s and 47MB/s.

Backing up large collections of small files proved to be more challenging... CIFS write performance seems to be a problem.

Backing up large collections of small files proved to be more challenging with a 17.4GB folder with 10,500 files averaging only 20MB/s. CIFS write performance seems to be a problem as using FileZilla to FTP the video clip returned 83MB/s write speeds.

The StorCenter px4-300r has a good range of storage sharing features with extensive cloud-based services at the top of the list. It's easy to install as well, but with a diskless model costing over 1,000 it is very expensive. If cloud backup services aren't your cup of tea then we recommend Synology's RS411 as that 1U appliance is faster, offers a very good range of storage features and costs a lot less.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

The StorCenter px4-300r has plenty of storage features with cloud-based backup and file sharing a highlight. Providing you don’t mind adding a port forwarding rule to your router, Iomega’s Personal Cloud will also prove very useful for sharing data securely with remote users. However, performance is disappointing and it is comparatively expensive making rival products such as Synology’s RS411 far better value.

Chassis: 1U rack chassis CPU: 2.2GHz Intel Celeron E1500 Memory: 2GB DDR2 Storage: 4 x hot-swap SATA drive bays Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, JBOD, hot spare Network: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Other ports: 3 x USB2 Management: Web browser Software: Iomega Storage Manager Warranty: 3 years RTB Options: Second power supply, £240 ex VAT

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.