Review: Iomega eGo Portable 250GB Hard Drive

Don Bradbury looks at the second of a pair of external hard drives, this one being intended primarily for portable application

Product	eGo Portable 250GB Hard Drive
Company	Iomega
Web	www.iomega-europe.com
Price	£91, incl VAT
We like	Quiet; reasonably cool running; bundled backup software; pocketability
We don't like	Single interface; slow and rather frustrating Retrospect Express HD 2.0.
Rating	8/10
Requirements

Here we have the second of a pair of drives that you could consider suitable for any application. The Buffalo DriveStation Combo that we reviewed recently was aimed primarily at the Desktop PC user who needs capacity. Now this second offering is a drive that can easily be popped into a jacket pocket and transported across the world to attach to another computer perhaps, or simply moved between machines in the office or home.

Being aimed at the portable drive user, this Iomega eGo Portable 250GB drive takes all its power from the USB port through which the data transfers will take place. But for those odd occasions when one USB port cannot provide sufficient power on it's own, the eGo piggy-backs a second USB lead in the cable which can be plugged into a second USB port. Not ideal, you might think, and rather extravagant of USB ports, but it's rare that it will prove necessary. We found we didn't need to use it, but it's there for when (or if) you do.

So the eGo's USB 2.0 mini port is the sole data transfer interface. No Firewire option is provided, but then Firewire is not the universal provision that USB finds itself being. Those who want to transfer data from their video camera may miss not having a Firewire port. If they do have this requirement, there would be better options than the Iomega eGo Portable. For the rest of us, USB 2.0 is perfectly appropriate, though is does use the proprietary miniport and therefore you have to use a suitable cable. That might be considered unfortunate if you want to transport the device around.

Portable drives such as this typically use low power consumption, 5400rpm disks. They are slower than the average 7200rpm drive mainly used in desktop units where a power brick can be employed, but portable units gain by taking their power from the interface port, thus gaining in the portability stakes and causing less cabling clutter.

Iomega eGo Portable 250GB external drive

As we said, the Iomega eGo drive has no power supply, but instead provides the twin USB leads to cater for those PCs which rebel at having access to only a single port. Although, like the Buffalo drive we reviewed previously, it required a restart of the computer before Vista could tell what exactly was being attached, it then needed access to only a single USB port to draw sufficient power to run it.

Our sample came in flaming pillar box red, though their are alternative colours, and the hip-flask shape was considered eminently suitable for slipping into a pocket to transport between machines. With the mini-USB 2.0 port, and a flashing LED to indicate activity, that was about all the adornment there was on offer except for a 5v DC socket for the fastidious. They would need to provide their own mains power adapter.

The eGo's case felt strong, the Western Digital WD25 disk it housed ran suitably cool and quiet, and the performance via the USB 2.0 interface was surprisingly quick in general application. We don't consider that performance data is really worth quoting in absolute terms because, as we've pointed out before, they depend too much on not only the type of files involved but the host machine's capability to supply the data stream. Suffice to say that the eGo didn't disappoint in our file copy/paste tests, particularly with it being aimed primarily at portable application.

Backup Provisions

We cannot, however, say the same while the drive was running it's provide EMC Retrospect Express HD backup software in default mode (though with Device Manager in Windows Vista set to "Optimise for Performance" for the disk). Downloadable (35.9MB) from the EMC website - there's a code provided for it in the Iomega pack - Retrospect Express HD 2.0 we found to be a useful product, incorporating facilities for both backup and file duplication (now called Copy). But in comparison with our usual backup software, the process was slow. Acronis TrueImage v11 completed a full backup of our twin partition main drive, containing 41.5GB of files, to the Iomega eGo in 53 minutes, whereas Retrospect Express HD 2.0 took 95 minutes, both procedures including a verification run on the backup. In it's default mode without verification, TrueImage v11 could complete the same task in just 28 minutes, but we didn't locate an option to switch off verification with this version of Retrospect Express.

You can change the default backup strategy which does not employ file compression to one that does. If you struggle to find that option, it's a drop-down that's available by right clicking in the Retrospect backup location screen, accessed during Setup, and selecting 'on' instead of 'off'. A useful 32% compression was achieved in this way, but only at the expense of the backup process extending to a painful 2hrs 19mins for the previously quoted case. Of course that time will depend on factors such as the types of file involved and the processing power you can bring to bear. It's worth noting here that after your first full system backup run, only changed and added files are backed up and added to your first full archive, so that process doesn't involve such long backup periods, therefore it's tolerable.

Incidentally, if you don't intend to operate scheduled backups/copies, we'd stop the program loading at Windows startup and start from a desktop shortcut (or the main menu) instead. That would defeat a principle aim of the program, of course, but scheduled operation can rather get in the way of using the computer if you're not one for leaving the computer switched on while away from your desk. If you're forgetful of backing up, however, or if you make lots of important daily changes to your files, you should leave scheduling switched on.

The useful Copy (file duplicate) process, as well as backup, while they worked well enough on our chosen selection of drives and folders, gave a rather indecisive indication when the process was complete beyond the "stop this copy (or backup)" message reverting to the initial "copy (or backup) now". A minor point; you soon get used to it.

On demand, or fully scheduled, Retrospect Express did the data backup job reliably, and although the file selection process could be somewhat frustrating, we valued the facility to duplicate (Copy) files onto the backup drive as well as have them backed up. The Copy option lets you open work files in their own application directly; there's no need to restore from backups or mount a drive to read or restore them. That can get you back into action with an important deleted or corrupted file in the shortest possible time.

In conclusion

Substantially more expensive at 36p/GB than the Buffalo DriveStation Combo we recently looked at, this Iomega eGo Portable 250GB drive worked well provided you're sure you need to pay for the portability aspect of it's design. We would have little hesitation in recommending it provided that you are either prepared to employ your own choice of backup software, or be patient while EMC Retrospect Express HD 2.0 does the job for you. We'd avail ourselves of the opportunity to upgrade the software as and when EMC put updates on their web site (right click the System Tray icon to check).

 

Don Bradbury