Designed for personal use, the compact Iomega Network Hard Drive offers simple setup, backup utilities and the ability to connect directly to PCs via their Ethernet ports. Because of this direct-to-PC capability, you can take this drive along when you travel, in addition to using it as part of your network back at home base.

The Network Hard Drive lacks folder security features: as it is, anyone with access to the drive can read anything on it. However, the unit is a snap to install and use--it showed up in My Network Places even before we ran the included Discovery utility.

An excellent selection of consumer software is bundled with it: Adobe Photoshop Album, Musicmatch and Iomega Automatic Backup. These three applications neatly epitomise the reasons most home users will be interested in this device.

Iomega Automatic Backup in particular is easy to use. You simply select the files you want to back up, choose a schedule and destination drive (the Network Hard Drive) and you're done. Restoring data is equally quick: you just drag and drop the desired files back to your hard disk.

The main weakness of the Network Hard Drive was its performance; it was among the slowest storage appliances we have tested. If you are only copying a file or two here and there and backing up at night, performance shouldn't be an issue. If you regularly copy large amounts of data, however, you'd be better off with a faster drive.