Iomega HDD 250Gb USB/FireWire Desktop Hard Drive review

13 November 2003 16:04 GMT / By Stuart Miles

With the world going digital one thing we all need is more hard drive space. Whether it's transferring your entire CD collection to a digital medium, or storing vast amounts of picture or video files it is something that we can't get by without. Iomega range of hard drives offers all of the above, yet with the added ability of being portable.

Both PC and Mac Compatible Iomega's latest drive is a whopping 250Gb of hard drive. Coming in a box the size of a paperback novel, the size is not the only thing that has been updated since the drive range's last outing. Weight has been vastly improved and you'll find the new 250Gb is actually lighter than the 120Gb also made by Iomega. The drive speed is 7200RPM making this fast enough for most applications and better still to stop any comment on transfer speeds the drive is USB2.0 and FireWire compliant.

Users hoping to use the drive for back up purposes won't be disappointed either with the drive being shipped with Norton's Ghost (see our review in the software channel) and Iomega's own Automatic backup software. Both are good for what they set out to and both offer an out of box solution and when taking the drive out and using with other machines, good old USB is all you need to obtain your external drive in modern operating systems. Eventually 250Gb at a time may become too small, but at the moment only video producers or big-time pirates will bust this capacity in at least the next two years.

Verdict

Whether you are looking to cart around your media files on a portable device to share between computers or back-up your hard drive to avoid all the viruses that seem to be floating around at the moment, Iomega's drive is easy to install and more importantly use. That coupled with its large disk storage capacity means that you'll be able to put plenty on it without the worry on running out of space. A good storage solution.

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Review Recap

Made by: Iomega
Price as reviewed: £250
The good: Stacks of space, free Norton Ghost, USB2.0 and Firewire
The bad: None
Quick verdict: 250Gb at a time which can be carried around – with USB compliance- equals the current internal IDE maximum, so shortlist
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