After 2 years, here is my IOmega IX2 review! One day I was looking around the buy.com website looking for good deals to be had.  I came across an Iomega IX2 NAS Drive with no included drives for $80 and decided to give it a try.

I currently kept all my data on my main home computer and shared it over the network to the other computers needing to store data.  My home PC was acting like a workstation and a server.  At the time, I was working hard to reduce my families carbon footprint and was looking for ways to cut our energy use.  Running computers were just drawing too much power to keep on all the time.

I ordered the NAS device and put in a pair of 300 GB drives I has lying around.  I quickly loaded some of our data to the NAS and realized 300 GB wasn’t enough space.  Before I committed to spending more money on new hard drives, I needed to see if it would meet my needs.  Installation was a breeze using the web interface built into the hardware.

What to put on it?

Being an amateur photographer, I have lots and lots of digital pictures and I quickly loaded everything I had to the NAS.  I followed it up with all our files, letters, and data, and the few home video’s we have taken over the years.  I then downloaded WIFI apps for our tablets and presto, I can now see all my data from anywhere in the house. 

This would be great if I never leave the house (but I do sometimes).  Because I do leave the house sometimes, I needed a new plan.  Using a VPN server could be a solution to see my data when I am out of the house but would be difficult to setup.

It took some time to get the Windows XP VPN server running (no additional power was added to our footprint as I created a virtual machine on our ESX farm to support the VPN).  Now I was cooking with fire. 

I had all the abilities of regular cloud storage but not limited o the 5-25 GB of free space most providers offered. 

I decided the NAS was a great way to share data between all the family members.  Cutting back our power use was also important too.  I then decided to upgrade it with more storage (a pair of 1TB drives).  The new storage was now in place and in no time, I was running on my mirrored NAS.  I also have plenty of space to grow into down the road.

IOmega IX2 Review, Two years later…..

Its been over 2 years now and I have been slowly increasing my data on the NAS.  I have been converting home videos and photos to digital and collecting lots of free ebooks. 

I am also keeping a software library so we can easily find any downloaded software we need to deploy.  We are using about 100GB of the NAS for supporting some of the more critical VM’s in the ESX farm (I will write more about this another time). 

I am less worried not about losing data since the NAS is mirrored.  I perform automatic backups of the NAS on a weekly basis.  Once a month, I also try to get a copy on one of the portable hard drives and save a copy in a fireproof safe.

If you learn anything from reading this, do your backups regularly!

The problem with most families is they are taking lots of family photos and videos and storing them on their home computer. 

Once on the home computer, they are never backed up. 

I have a small business where I fix computers for people and this is the most common problem I run into.  Someone calls me in a panic and their computer will no longer start-up.  They have loads of pictures and data that they cannot lose. 

They are willing to pay any amount of money to have recovered.  Having a home NAS server is like life insurance.  It will preserve your family data long after your home PC dies.  Setting up an automatic backup of the NAS will also protect you in the case the NAS server dies but given these are much simpler devices than a regular PC, they are usually more dependable.

Any family with several computers in the house should get a home NAS server. 

NAS servers are simple to set up and often reliable if built with quality hard drives. 

There are cheaper ways to preserve your data.  The problem is it will require you to monitor and back it up.  Most people just will not do it. Families know they should, like taking vitamins and exercising, but other things quickly get in the way.  Data backups get moved to the back burner.

Summary of the Iomega IX-2 NAS Server

It was the least expensive one available to me and probably not the most reliable one.  I have read plenty of reviews noting problems with the device but I have not had a single problem since I bought it. 

Reliability will depend on the hard drives and quality drives are largely a matter of luck finding. 

I can say one thing for sure, don’t go with the cheapest drives you can find.  NAS servers are typically always on and spinning and need a drive that can take the extra workload.

Let me know your opinion of the Iomega IX2 or another family NAS drive in the comments section below.  I am also interested if you had any experience with the Iomega IX-2 NAS server, good or bad.