Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive 500GB review

Iomega's Home Media drive has an attractive brushed-metal case and can be positioned either vertically or horizontally with the included stand.

Configuring it is straightforward thanks to the uncluttered and well-labelled setup utility and web configuration interface.

By default, there's no administrator password to protect the settings from other people on your network, so you should add one immediately. You can't organise users into groups for easier administration, but this is only a problem if you have lots of users.

It worked flawlessly as a UPnP media server, but iTunes refused to recognise it as a music server. We had no trouble using the Home Media drive to share a USB printer or the contents of a USB disk across our network. We were surprised by the lack of an FTP server, making this one of only two NAS devices here without this capability. As there's no remote access feature either, you can't easily access your files over the internet.

Although the Home Media drive is one of the cheapest NAS devices here, with a cost of just 24p per gigabyte, it performed well in our file-transfer benchmarks. Whether copying large or small files, it tended to be faster at reading files than writing them. It wrote large files at 14.3MB/s and read them at 24.6MB/s. Small files were written at just under 13MB/s and were read at 22MB/s.

EMC's Retrospect backup software is included. This useful program can back up your files according to a schedule and copy only those files that have changed since the last backup. It's one of the better backup programs included with a NAS in this roundup.

Iomega's Home Media NAS is quick and affordable, although it's not suitable if you want to access your files over the internet. It's good value, but if you can stretch your budget a little further, Western Digital's My Book World Edition is even better. It has twice the storage for just £12 more.