I wouldn’t want to be a drive manufacturer these days. With drive prices at all-time lows, low-cost or free remote storage caches available to users, it must be tough to make a buck. Iomega is attempting to reclaim some drive space with the introduction of their Home Network Drive line, affordable drives designed to sit on your home net, serving the computers on it. It offers Ethernet connectivity at a price competitive with USB-only external drives. A 320GB drive is available for $150, a 500GB drive for $200.
While this is a good concept in theory, and the prices aren’t half bad, the success of this line likely rests on the software. To work, it should be *very* plug n’ play and work with everything (these drives allegedly work with PC, Mac, and Linux). I’ve never been very happy with Iomega’s ease of use software overall. I think the whole area of backup software sucks. Even Apple makes backup software that befuddles the average user. If Iomega (or anyone) could make backup and share tools that are truly easy to use and hardware that talks to everything (e.g. my TiVo’s on my home network, why can’t I use my Home Network Drive to stash TV programming there?), they might have something.
Read details of the 500GB drive here.
