I wanted a NAS device that was compatible with itunes so I could share music across my wifi network. That's pretty much the only reason I bought this product - everything else it purports to do is a bonus. NAS devices generally get somewhat poor reviews on Amazon (and elsewhere), unless you're prepared to pay through the nose. With an average 4 stars, this looked like the best 2TB unit out there. So I was to say the least disappointed to discover that it isn't compatible with the current version of itunes (10.5), despite Iomega advertising it as such. Apparently, it's well-known that Apple's latest update has broken the itunes compatibility of this unit and others as well (and not for the first time). Their motivation for doing so is a matter of debate and discussion (iOS5 introduced a cloud service to iThings, didn't it?), and in a sense this is Apple's "fault", not Iomega's. Set up of the device was OK, but not the completely smooth experience others have reported. A word of warning - copying media files over wifi is incredibly slow. Much better to hook up directly to the box with a cat5/6 cable. Copying 35 gigs of music took 50 minutes. I've no idea if this is slow or fast, but it's a lot quicker than the 7 hours it would have taken wirelessly. It was also just a matter of dragging and dropping the whole itunes folder into the music share using Windows Explorer. The device was then fairly easily picked up by itunes once I'd changed a few settings (such as the default file path - I got this stuff from the internet by the way; Iomega's documentation is poor and sometimes out of date). This is where the problems began. When I clicked on the shared music library, the contents of the device flashed up for a second before "jumping" back to the library stored locally on the laptop I was using. I tried all sorts to make this work, but eventually discovered that this incompatibility is a "known issue", which my pre-purchase research on google hadn't uncovered.
So, fair enough, that's down to Apple, for whatever reason. My issue with Iomega is that the latest firmware update does not address this (it made no difference), and that they've known about it since the itunes update but have failed to tackle it. Other NAS manufacturers have apparently sorted this out already. The best I could get out of Iomega support is that a future firmware update "MAY" address this problem. In the meantime, they continue to advertise the unit as compatible with itunes (I suppose it is in a way; apparently, the previous version works OK, if you're prepared to roll back to that one). Anyway, after a strongly worded e-mail exchange with Iomega, they are offering me a "product upgrade" to a Storcenter iX2-200. But the Amazon reviews for this are much worse, so I'm not sure if this is any kind of upgrade at all. All I want is for Iomega to fix the compatibility issue; then I think this might be a decent NAS for the price.
