Iomega Prestige 320 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive 34807

In my stubbornness, I have only ever built my own external drives by placing internal drives inside external enclosures. This has served me well over the years but the benefits of a DIY external drive have greatly diminished mainly due to a drop in prices, nearly comparable warranties, and attractive yet durable enclosures. The Iomega Prestige Compact hard drive is the first pre-built external drive I've ever owned.

PROS:
- Attractive and compact design
- Drop Shock protection
- Good Seagate ST9500325AS drive inside (500GB model)
- No external power supply required
- 3 Year warranty w/registration

CONS:
- Might be more expensive than the competition
- Ho hum software bundle

Honestly, I still think of Iomega as the Zip Drive company who's claim to fame were faulty drives and their "click of deaths." Still, I owned three of their Zip drives over the years and hadn't really paid attention to their...Read more

There's not a lot to say about this product: it simply works, unobtrusively and according to spec. I have a number of other USB hard drives from various vendors, and they all perform pretty much the same. The Iomega includes a cable with two USB connectors, so that if the USB port on your computer doesn't produce enough power, you can get some extra juice from another port. I never needed the extra amps in my Mac Mini. The drive also ships with some bonus software pre-installed on it, but since I planned to use it with my Mac the first thing I did was reformat the drive, So, no comments on the bonus software.

I did try some simple performance tests, copying around 75GB of data between the various hard drives attached to my system (built-in, USB, and FireWire). The Iomega produced the same numbers as the other USB drives, suggesting that perhaps the USB bus is the limiting factor.

The vendors may not like this, but today these items have become commodities...Read more

This product is for people that need more storage than a reasonably priced thumb drive contains, but still need that data to be portable. Having lugged standard-sized external hard drives to and from work many times, I can really appreciate this product. It is a bit difficult to get your head around the size, and it may be a bit bigger than you are expecting. Think of a typical wallet size, but much taller. It is pocketable, but you probably wouldn't want to do that, both because it is too big to be comfortable and because it might not last long with that abuse. This is simply a hard drive in an enclosure, after all. However, this is the perfect size for a messenger bag or purse. Keeping it with the laptop or netbook is easy if you want to carry pictures or movies with you. Also, this is perfect for making regular system backups and carrying them to a different location in case of emergency, such as a house fire.

For a hard drive, this looks surprisingly sleek,...Read more