Iomega PX4 NAS Device – Hands on Review

With Iomega’s recent release of their exciting new PX series of NAS devices I have been fortunate enough to get my hands on one of these funky new units. I have been a happy Iomega IX4 owner for the past two years and run two of them 24×7 in my home VMware vSphere lab.  In this time the only issue I’ve had is a single disk failure in one of the units which in my view isn’t bad going since they’re permanently left on and have live VMs running on them.

There are three models in the Iomega PX series the most notable differences between them being the number of maximum drives, the form factor (ie: free standing versus rack mount) and some minor differences in CPU speed and memory in the device.

The Iomega PX series of NAS devices offer a number of improvements and enhancements over the IX series which makes a compelling reason to take a serious look at the PX if you’re in the market for a NAS for either home, a remote office or a SMB.  One of the most notable improvements for me is the increase in CPU and memory along with the inclusion of removable disk caddies which allows for 2.5” form factor SSD disks – great for adding that extra IOPS horsepower, and yes you can have a mix of conventional 3.5” SATA disks and 2.5” SSDs – cool !

You can’t beat hands on time with a product so here is a quick sub-6 minute overview of the actual physical PX4 product itself including comparisons with the older IX4 model.  Hope you find it of use. 

** Update: 28/06/2011 – Thanks to Mike Foley for pointing out that the USB on the front of the PX is in fact USB 3.0 and not just a USB 2.0 as I mention in the video. 

The following is a high level summary of some of these features and the specification of the Iomega PX devices:

• High performance through optional solid state drives, dual Core Intel processor, 2GB memory and dual GbE NICs.
• Multiple RAID levels – 0, 1, 10, 5, 5+1 (hot spare) and 6, all with automatic RAID rebuild and hot swap functionality.
• Scalable configurations include fully populated, partially populated and diskless options. 7200 rpm SATA HDDs and SSD Drives are available from Iomega or may be purchased from the approved vendor list.
• Active Directory Support and remote access for anytime, anywhere data availability.
• Certified for VMware^® vSphere 4.0, Citrix^® XenServer™, and Windows Server 2003/2008/2008 R2.
• Cross-platform file sharing with Windows^®, Mac^® and Linux computers, and simultaneous iSCSI block access for the most efficient storage utilization.
• All major network file protocols supported.
• Iomega Personal Cloud technology, a revolutionary web-based computing architecture that connects your Iomega network storage device to other individuals and/or devices via the Internet.
• Windows Active Directory Trusted Domains, MSCS and Hyper-V Live Migration Support.
• Data replication and device-to-device copy jobs keeps your data backed up and secure.

I will be putting the Iomega PX4 through its paces in the coming weeks so expect a couple of blog posts here on the performance and usability of the PX NAS device.