I've spotted a scattering of previews and a single review of the Iomega Iconnect which is now available. What a great idea, a USB device that hosts other usb devices and is accessible via the normal TCP/IP network capabilities (wired or wireless) of your PC.
This looks really handy to me - I can plug in my 1TB backup drive, a USB memory stick and a printer. At £60 it is an almost unique item at a sensible cost.
It is actually available for purchase now (in fact iomega emailled me to tell me so) and the Iomega site has demo of the web interface that you will get in production.
Unfortunately, it has the typical design flaw applied to usb devices designed by someone who hasn't got a clue, firstly, not enough USB ports, so very quickly you would need two of these, good for making money, not so good for sockets and secondly, usb on the front and back so it doesn't matter how the device is positioned messy wires still protrude - for pete's sake designers, spend a little time thinking about who will actually use these things & how, casual USB use will still be via the desktop.
Discouraged, actually no, the device looks so great, it even has remote internet access, admittedly via a pay for service but you'd have to fiddle with port forwarding on your router anyway (well except for those of you who forgot security) so why not just skip the web service and let yourself directly in?
So why haven't I purchased on yet? Well I have an HP D5460 printer with the usual 2 way usb capabilities - it is used on 2 PCs & I've got the usb cable taped to a desk leg for convenience of swapping over so having the printer on the network would be great but I do like the 2 way comms.
More and more devices support modern usb features, does the Iomega Connect? Who knows, the manual does not say but what it does say is "connect a supported printer". Is there a list of supported printers? No.
I've raised a support call with Iomega - they have responded which is good - they even responded same day (now 7 days ago) with "we'll check to see if a supported printer list exists". Why say connect a supported printer if you don't know what is supported.
There, that's off my chest now.
-
Starship Scorpion by Tripp Ellis My rating: 4 of 5 stars Enjoyable read, good sci-fi story. ...
-
I've just encountered a user who wanted to run a stored procedure or 3 against as SQL Server database on which he ws not the owner of th...
Have tried the iConnect for some days on my iMac. Spent hours trying to get it to work like I want - and still it doesn´t. Automated back-ups through OS X´ Time Machine application does not work. Streaming to my DLNA-certified TV does not work. Torrents? Ha. No chance. Just plain copy and paste of files to and from the unit takes forever. It is a cheap NAS. But out-of-the-box it does not perform at all. I will invest a few more hours on this thing before it flies out of my window (it probably won´t fly very well either).
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to hear about your experience, sounds disappointing to say the least. I'm wondering if your problems are Mac related - have you had a chance to try on a PC, yes, you hate me now & there is no reason for inadequate Mac support in this day and age but me thinks Iomega products have always been a bit shoddy (work had Zip drives that all became redundant with the advent of Win XP, I had a ditto drive that worked on the first Wednesday of a month if it was raining or some similar unlikely occurence) - I just keep hoping as they have good pricing that one day something will work really well.
ReplyDeleteFinally, I received a response from Iomega :
ReplyDelete"We are using CUPS for print functionality, which is proven very stable and does work with a large number of printers. Unlike printer manufacturers who certified their device for an operating system, we can’t do the same as our device is used as a pass-through for printing jobs.
Also we do state in our documentation: The StorCenter print server is not guaranteed to work with all printers. For best results, use a printer without multi-function features.
If you require more information, please do not hesitate to contact us again."
Yes, I require more information, I require the list of compatible printers as specified in the Iomega documentation. Let's see which comes first, new documentation, or an answer.
Hi balance, do you have any news from Iomega, i crashed against the wall with them. same as you.
ReplyDeletecould you make it work?
thanks in advance
I never actually made the purchase - I asked the questions before buying as I wanted to make sure it would work before I started and suppliers usually make an effort to take your money but I got absolutely nowhere. To say they were unhelpful would be a significant understatement.
ReplyDeleteI did look at the pogoplug too for sharing USB drives and ended up doing a little background research because usb connectivity on routers is appearing now and it appears there is a standard driver they support for printing but HP seem to be equally unsupportive about providing compatibility info so it's all down to finding someone who has already tried and succeeded before parting with cash.
Hi Guys,
ReplyDeleteI just bought me a iConnect and it is very dissapointing indeed. Connecting a HDD is done in a minute. Getting a HP printer connected and working.....isn't.
I don't know what a compatible printer should be but my HP OfficeJet isn't I can tell you that.
The iConnect does find the printer and let it be shared in the network. So far so good and it looks promising. But printing just doesn't work.
I don't know what Iomega's vision regarding this issue will be. But I think that they have made it for more modern printers then mine. That would surprise me because almost every recent printer is delivered with a network connection. People who buy this device probably buy it to connect an "old" printer to a network. (next to the NAS functionality)
Sorry to hear that - unfortunately all I can say is good luck with Iomega "support" as they seemed incapable of support last contact I had.
ReplyDeleteHi,
ReplyDeleteI'm currently facing the same situation.
Did you ever get any response or a solution from iomega?
Thanks.
What little contact I had was so useless there are other Iomega products I've looked at and rejected as a result of this experience. Iomega do seem good at producing consumer centric products at practical prices but seem incapable of providing support. My advice, steer clear of Iomega.
ReplyDeleteHello,
ReplyDeleteI bought two iOmega iConnect devices, and will return them on Monday.
I wanted to connect 2x2TB,2x1.5TB and 3x1TB + 233GB to them, but after having tried the first device decided never to take out the second out of its box.
Problems encountered in the first week with 1 device, wired to my router, with 2 USB HDD's connected to it:
1) terrrrrribly slooooow transfer speeds of approx 3-4 MB/s writing and 5-6 MB/s reading;
2) unstable: during large file transfer jobs the device crashes, waits for some 10 - 50 minutes, resets, and is up and "running"(rather say crawling) again after sometimes more than 1 hour; supposedly this has to do with the drives being formatted at NTFS - but hey: if that's a problem then don't mention it as being compatible at first! and what to do with my DVD iso's if the advice is to switch to FAT32?!
3) Media Server: alright, Twonky of some kind might be built in, but when indexing my music collection (f around 10.000 songs) and building its index file it crashes becuase that's obviously too much. But if I had a smaller collection, I'd leave it on my internal HDD - the size of the library is a main reason to switch to an external drive, no?
4)Torrent downloading: ok, but when downloaded the files have to be processed, and that's an issue with the CPU and memory involved: while performing other disk operations the device crashes - too much for it. Poor thing...
5) Network connectivity: the wired network is the fastest (actually when switching on wired + wireless the speed slows down!) but it often disconnects. It will send you an email about this (nice) but -of course- only after the network connection is restored. This is often done by yourself manually, since you notice there is no network connectivity - when restored, you get the message it actually wanted to send you when it couldn't. Duuuh....
Really: I don't think there has been real engineers involved in designing this device. It might have been an educational thing for first year students, but this whole thing is sad.
Verdict: if you want to be disappointed, then buy this device. Otherwise don't.
I am yet to hear genuine positive comments about Iomega, indeed, I was looking for a media player device and there are Iomega ones out there that look good on paper but I just cannot bring myself to even consider trying them.
ReplyDeleteI agree with everyone on compatibility,,, it just plain sucks. I did read some reviews but, figured most just didn't know how to set things up,,, i guess they were all correct about it being a piece of junk (nice paper weight). I can say that so far for my HDD's connected as well as thumb drives, it works OK well sort of slow. I have tried to get 2 Lexmark printers to work (Lexmark z730 As well as Lexmark x8350 all in one) and both failed to do anything, they show up in the Iomega list, not sure why because they sure don't work. I am going to keep it only for the USB hard drives I have,,, but other than that, TIE a Brick around it and throw it in the nearest river. END of Story.
ReplyDelete