Reviews - Iomega StorCenter ix4-300d

[HEXUS]

Iomega brings more speed to the mid-range ix4-series NAS.

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[Savas]

Why do these NAS, essentially bare-bones have inside them that makes them so expensive? This is £460 off the shelf.

A high quality case, £100,
a motherboard, £50,
open source software: £0

What am I missing?

[Funkstar]

Part of it is that everyone uses their own custom made hardware, so development costs a quite high. Total volumes of these are respectable, but volume sales for an individual unit would be pretty low I suspect. This means those dev costs need to be split over a relatively low number of units, meaning the costs are actually higher than you would guess.

Add in the support and software development costs (yes most of the software is OSS, not all of it is and there are quite a few custom components and features) and you have a good portion of that cost.

I fully expect there are also higher margins to be made on these as turn key solutions compared to standard parts which can have as little as 1-5% margins at each stage.

[natesimon89]

Does the comment, Some limitations; strictly a single-volume NAS, mean that you cannot create 2 ESXi Datastores, or 1 volume and lots of vparttions to present as iSCSI targets?