Iomega StorCenter px6-300d review

Iomega's StorCenter px6-300d is the company's first desktop NAS appliance to use an Atom processor and support RAID 6. It claims to provide every network storage facility an SMB could need and in this review Dave Mitchell finds out if its performance is as compelling as its features.

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The standard video surveillance feature provides live views of IP cameras as well as scheduled recordings.

The standard video surveillance feature provides live views of IP cameras as well as scheduled recordings.

The integration with Axis' remote footage hosting service is a clever way of local storage working in tandem with the cloud.

Standard surveillance features are good as the appliance supports up to ten UPnP IP cameras. We tested this with an Axis 216FD which was discovered automatically allowing us to watch its live view from the admin web interface and set up recording schedules to a predefined share.

IP SANs are easy to configure as once you've created your targets, you can use the Storage Manager to handle all client iSCSI initiator configuration and target logon. Performance is very good with Iometer reporting a fast 112MB/s raw read speed for a 50GB target, but there's no iSCSI thin provisioning.

The appliance delivered some good overall speeds in our performance tests. Using a Broadberry dual Xeon X5560 rack server running Windows Server 2008 R2, we saw drag and drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip return read and write speeds of 92MB/s and 45MB/s.

FTP operations were markedly better with the FileZilla client reporting read and write speeds of 107MB/s and 86MB/s. However, a drag and drop copy of a 17.4GB folder with 10,500 small files returned a pedestrian 21MB/s.

We also tested backup performance using Symantec's Backup Exec 2010. Backing up a 17.4GB test folder to a network share saw average speeds of 41.5MB/s. Using an iSCSI target saw this improve to 65MB/s.

Apart from CIFS/SMB write speeds, the px6-300d delivered a good set of results across all our other tests. It combines these with plenty of backup features that are easy to use. Providing you shop around you can get a good deal on all models.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

The StorCenter px6-300d is comparatively good value and has an impressive range of network storage features. Backup tools are particularly good, Iomega’s Personal Cloud provides easily configured, secure remote access and the appliance returned some respectable speeds in our performance tests.

Chassis: Desktop CPU: 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 Memory: 2GB DDR2 Storage: 6 x 2TB Hitachi Deskstar SATA3 hard disks in hot-swap carriers Disk interfaces: SATA2 Array support: RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 6, JBOD, hot spare Network: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Other ports: 1 x USB3, 2 x USB2 Management: Web browser Software: Iomega Storage Manager Warranty: Three years RTB

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.