Latest StorCenter NAS appliance from Iomega packs 2x500GB (1TB), RAID into $349 package

I'm in NYC this week looking to hunt down interesting technologies at the Digital Life event in the Jacob Javits Convention Center. But, on the eve of the event, in the new New York Times building (still under construction) on 8th Avenue, I attended Showstoppers -- a 3 hour show n' tell event that's set up for press who want to get an early start. One of the first products I encountered was Iomega's StorCenter Network Hard Drive 1 TB.

In the video above, Iomega reviews manager Todd Schulke gives me the elevator pitch for the network attached storage device which costs only $349. To get to 1 terabyte, the StorCenter uses two 500GBMB drives which can be configured as JBOD (Just a bunch of drives), RAID 0, or RAID 1. Whereas the JBOD and RAID 0 configurations still net you 1 TB of storage, the RAID 1 configuration, based on the way it writes the same data to both drives (for redundancy's sake), will only net you 500GBMB. The tiny NAS device can turn any printer thats connected to its USB port into a shared network printer (the workstations will still need to load the appropriate drivers). On the rear panel of the StorCenter is a Gigabit Ethernet port.

About the only downside, when you consider Iomega's heritage in removable storage, is that the drives are not removable. So, just supposing you did take the RAID 1 configuration and one of the drives failed, you would still have to send the entire NAS device back to Iomega for repair. Also in the video, I show Iomega's other NAS device, the StorCenter Pro 150d which uses 4 drives, goes up to 3 terabytes, and supports RAID 5.