Iomega eGo 250 GB Portable Hard Drive, FireWire 400
Company: Iomega
Price: US $189.00
http://www.iomega.com
Iomega’s new eGO line of portable hard drives comes in colors, and I mean colors. The review drive I’ve been using for a while is red, Red, RED!
My techno-wife especially approved, as the red color matches her favorite toenail polish. If red’s not your fav shade, the Firewire-only eGO drives come in black and white, as well. If you crave more color choices, the USB versions come in a high fashion palette of red, black, blue, pink, and silver.
The eGO’s case is nicely shaped; it reminds me of a hip flask, flat on the bottom and curved on top. Iomega could even use the marketing slogan, "eGO drives let you take a sip of your data."
Enough about colors and shapes; we need to see if the drive performs.
We tested the Firewire 400 model. Iomega also sells eGO drives with USB 2.0 only, and combo Firewire 400/USB 2.0.
Iomega gets extra points for making the drive bus-powered, so no external power supply is needed. This is great for traveling, as having to cart around a wall wart is annoying. Iomega does provide a good quality Firewire 400 cable, so you’re ready to go eGO right out of the box.
Iomega lost a point or two by using fluffy marketing slogans like "Patent Pending DropGuardâ„¢ foam protector feature." What’s DropGuard? I spent 5 minutes searching through the Iomega web site trying to find what DropGuard really is, or does, and came up with nothing. So for now, DropGuard is a triumph of marketing over technology.
Plugged in and running, the drive is virtually silent, at least to my 51 year-old aviator’s ears.
Before doing any testing, we erased and repartitioned the drive, as it comes set for use with Windows machines. Mac users would be well advised to use Disk Utility to partition the drive as needed for your Mac. Intel Mac owners need to partition the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and then click the Option button, and choose the Apple GUID option. if you don’t choose the GUID option, you won’t be able to boot off the drive. See this link for more information.
Once the partitioning exercise was complete, we used Drive Genius 2.02’s suite of disk tests.
Here are the results:
- Sustained writes: 114 MB/sec.
Sustained reads: 130 MB/sec.
Random writes: 117 MB/sec.
Random reads: 77 MB/sec.
This is nowhere near as fast the main drive as my 2.66 gHz Mac Pro. But don’t expect blazing desktop performance from any portable drive. The eGO Firewire 400 is a 2.5" notebook-sized 5400 RPM drive, with 8 megabytes of cache RAM.
Drive Genius’ benchmark list shows the 250GB eGO Firewire performing much like the drive in a 2.0 gHz G5 Power Mac. However, newer Intel Macintoshes do better.
All in all, for a portable drive, the eGO’s performance is nothing to scoff at.
Iomega also includes a licensed copy of EMC® Retrospect® Express (roughly $42 at most resellers), a complex and powerful backup application. I’ve used Retrospect, but prefer other backup solutions, so I did not try using Retrospect with the eGO drive.
Conclusion.
Iomega’s eGO line of drives look great (pick the red one), and perform well. They are priced competitively with other 250 GB portable drives. With no wall wart to clutter your laptop bag, and a good quality cable in the box make this an attractive portable drive. Iomega; just tell buyers what DropGuard is!
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