iomega 34785 3TB Home Media Network Hard Drive, Cloud Edition

Pros: Iomega bent over backwards to cram features in a very affordable NAS.

Cons: NAS features without data retention is a useless combination. Data retention is the missing ingredient here.

Other Thoughts: Back in 1979, at MAI Basic Four, I used to clean heads every month and fix 10 MB Iomega removable 14-inch cartridge drives. I hoped data was safer in 3 TB sealed hard drives from Iomega. I was wrong. After testing this NAS for 5 months I trusted it enough to put a few hundred GB on it. The week after, it erased all content and the preset folders. Screw me once, shame on you, twice, shame on me. Now I have to take this drive out of its shell and into a USB dock for a post-mortem and some data recovery. Judging from other reviews it would be a waste of time to try contacting Iomega tech support. The only way I would go for cheap 1-drive NAS units would be if they could be linked into a raid-5 gigabit ethernet array. And that's my two bits.

Pros: Inexpensive NAS, quiet, web management console so no real need to install any drivers or software. Overall not bad for the price.

Cons: Iomega support is terrible, tried the chat support, waited for ever just to be told to call, called and waited for about 1 hour and gave up. Finally sent an e-mail and waiting for a response so I can get an RMA and return it under warranty.

Other Thoughts: Died shortly after 1 year and although still under warranty probably not worth getting it replaced. I used it as a primary backup drive but would not depend on it as my only backup drive. I gave it a two star because it lasted for about 1 year and has a 3 year warranty but what good is that if you can't get in touch with support to get an RMA to return it when it stops working under warranty.

Pros: None

Cons: I used this drive to backup pictures and documents. This drive corrupted every document and most of the pictures!

Other Thoughts: Do not trust this drive with your documents!

Pros: It uses electricity

Cons: Programs required to download killed my laptop

Other Thoughts: I took delivery of this item on Wednesday and I've been trying ever since to get it working.
6 hours on Wednesday evening.
4 hours on Thursday.
4 hours tonight (Friday).
I've spent hours and hours and hours on tech support lines with my internet provider and my router manufacturer (Linksys).
When i was trying to get live chats with Iomega I would wait online for two hours at a time and then be randomly booted because "there are no agents available" when I was number one on the cue. many times.
THEN WHEN I FINALLY GOT A LIVE PERSON ON THE ONLINE CHAT HE GAVE ME USELESS LINKS THAT GAVE A PROBLEM WITH NO SOLUTION.
THEN WHEN I FINALLY GOT SOMEONE ON THE PHONE HE WANTED $25 DOLLARS TO EVEN TALK TO ME.
The problem? I can't get the thing to work for the purpose that I bought it for. I BOUGHT IT FOR THE PERSONAL CLOUD AND CAN'T GET IT TO WORK
AND I'M COMPLETELY INSULTED THAT THEY WANT $25 TO EVEN TALK TO ME ABOUT THE PROBLEM.
I told him if I'm going to spend $25 it's going to be to send the thing back.
So on top of everything, I'm ticked that I have to spend money on shipping.

AS AN ADDENDUM

I spent today still trying to get this to work. As part of the process, you're supposed to send an email invite that sends a link to a VPN program and something that they call "Quickcopy" that downloads onto your computer.

BLUE SCREEN. Really???? I spent this much money on what is supposed to be tried, true and trusted and I get a blue screen?

Not only did I get BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH, but it took an hour in safe mode to recover my computer.

Oh Iomega tech support consists of here, go look at this link or ignoring questions on their community forum.

I DEFINITELY wouldn't recommend this to a friend to buy. Hell, I don't think I'd even recommend this to someone I hated.

Pros: It runs on electricity

Cons: read the comments

Other Thoughts: I took delivery of this item on Wednesday and I've been trying ever since to get it working.
6 hours on Wednesday evening.
4 hours on Thursday.
4 hours tonight (Friday).
I've spent hours and hours and hours on tech support lines with my internet provider and my router manufacturer (Linksys).
When i was trying to get live chats with Iomega I would wait online for two hours at a time and then be randomly booted because "there are no agents available" when I was number one on the cue. many times.
THEN WHEN I FINALLY GOT A LIVE PERSON ON THE ONLINE CHAT HE GAVE ME USELESS LINKS THAT GAVE A PROBLEM WITH NO SOLUTION.
THEN WHEN I FINALLY GOT SOMEONE ON THE PHONE HE WANTED $25 DOLLARS TO EVEN TALK TO ME.
The problem? I can't get the thing to work for the purpose that I bought it for. I BOUGHT IT FOR THE PERSONAL CLOUD AND CAN'T GET IT TO WORK
AND I'M COMPLETELY INSULTED THAT THEY WANT $25 TO EVEN TALK TO ME ABOUT THE PROBLEM.
I told him if I'm going to spend $25 it's going to be to send the thing back.
So on top of everything, I'm ticked that I have to spend money on shipping.

AS AN ADDENDUM

I spent today still trying to get this to work. As part of the process, you're supposed to send an email invite that sends a link to a VPN program and something that they call "Quickcopy" that downloads onto your computer.

BLUE SCREEN. Really???? I spent this much money on what is supposed to be tried, true and trusted and I get a blue screen?

Not only did I get BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH, but it took an hour in safe mode to recover my computer.

Oh Iomega tech support consists of here, go look at this link or ignoring questions on their community forum.

I DEFINITELY wouldn't recommend this to a friend to buy. Hell, I don't think I'd even recommend this to someone I hated.

Pros: When it works it works get.

Cons: When it is not working which seems to be most of the time.

Other Thoughts: Really won't buy another, Iomega gave us another thinking we may have had more hardware issues and the new one doesn't work any better.

Pros: Price. Good idea for about two months. Then the poor manufacturing of Seagate come into play.

Cons: Lost all of my backed up information after two months of moderate use. Completely unrecoverable all my family photos and videos gone. The drive just decided to corrupt all the data and delete all of my folders leaving nothing. Now I tried to recover the lost data using a utility which only recovered 5% of what was lost. Now I can't even reconnect to it to start over.

Other Thoughts: Please buy anything else but this that has a seagate drive. I've owned four Seagate drives all but one has given me problems and that's the one that had less than 1TB if memory.

Pros: It works very effectively as a hard drive that sits on a network-- I connected it via Ethernet to my router. Installation is simple and effective on my wireless XP and Win7 PC's. Drives directly map to letter drives in My Computer and this is what I wanted. It has some pretty sophisticated cloud server support and lots of other features, but that's all fluff to me.

Cons: Its really hard to come up with cons since all I wanted was a hard drive that sits on my network that all of my computers can see and this device meets my expectations.

Other Thoughts: The fact that it maps 4 unique drives (one for video, one for audio, etc.) is pretty goofy.

Pros: No issues. Cloud feature works awesome! Speed is good enough for me. Very happy.

Cons: none for now.

Pros: The drive works as intended, Many features to work with..

Cons: The Read, Write speed could be faster, says gigbit port?, but drive speed is holding this back, minus one star..