Iomega iConnect – a wireless data station


Kind of like a NAS without disks is basically what you get with this device – its a small slight box with GB ether port and 4 usb ports. If you install the supplied IOmega Storage manager you will discover the device on the network either directly connected to your machine or laptopn or via a switch. In my case I used the direct connect of a lan cable to a laptop to provide access – as another machine with a previous install of software could not find the devie on the network (I now actually think  it was because the two devices – storcentre and iconnect had the same device  name “Storage” by default).

However once an ip address was added and the name changed to something other than “storage” the iconnect was visible and accessible both via the web interface which is pretty much identical to the StorCenter IX2-200 and via the storage manager software which automatically mapped drive letters to the attached devices on the iconnect – in my case a corsair flash drive and  a seagate 500GB device.

So what is this device for – at a simple level a way of connecting usb drives to a network for data transfer and access – and in my case for testing access from virtual machines running on esx to access data on usb keys and disks. Yes I could achieve some of the same features by attaching devices to the Storcenter NAS but its normally housed in the computer room and not an office. Its also cheaper !!  Manuals for the device are found here 

So more as I get to explore the devices capabilities but key features

About the Iomega® iConnect Wireless Data Station



Key Features

  • Ethernet connectivity (10/100/1000Base-TX).
  • Supports mixed networks (Windows and Mac OS systems).
  • Supports SMB/CIFS (Windows) and AFP (Macintosh) protocols.
  • Supports mixed networks (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux/UNIX systems).
  • Supports 4 USB devices.

 

BTW – it also has a three year warranty !!!