Update Now it has decided to randomly erase everything when I rebooted it. Avoid this piece of tat at all costs and buy one of the Maxtor home NAS devices.

I got a 500GB Iomega Home NAS device a while ago simply because it was cheap. I needed a bit of networked storage so I could share things no matter which of my machines I was using, and it seemed to fit the bill.

Unfortunately, it sucks. Royally. Mangled SMB packets, random destruction of the domain, all manner of badness. Then I happened across a nugget of information. The firmware it ships with (K104.W11) is just rubbish, and the latest update (K108.W15) is even worse. However, an older firmware (K102.W11) is much, much more stable. Go figure.

Officially you can't get the older firmware any more. But unofficially, you can if you know where to look. So if you're having trouble with your Iomega Home NAS being crap, try reflashing it with this:

http://download.iomega.com/english/storcenter_home_fimrware-k102w11.bin

The misspelling of "fimrware" is deliberate, just so you don't think to try and correct the link. Anyway, it might make all your woes go away. It does say that it makes it incompatible with OS X leopard, but I'm not sure how that's the case if it's just using standard SMB. I think it's the automagical device discovery tool that's not Leopard aware, but the OS already comes with the findsmb command which does exactly the same thing. Suck it and see. It's dead easy to reflash with the latest firmware if necessary anyway.