Last Updated 5/Oct/2009
Review: Iomega Professional 1TB External Hard Disk
Don Bradbury takes a look at this new SATA II/USB 2.0 device
| Product | Professional 1TB External Hard Disk |
|---|---|
| Company | Iomega |
| Web | www.iomega-europe.com |
| Price | £94.99, incl VAT |
| We like | Fast SATA connectivity option. Cool, quiet drive. Never Down software, or EMC Retrospect, as backup programs |
| We don't like | eSATA involves a rather more awkward dismount procedure compared with USB |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements | Windows 2000, XP and Vista (all versions) |
In this day and age, 1TB of external drive capacity is not that unusual, but the provision of an eSATA port is. Backing that up with a USB 2.0 port makes sense, of course, to cater for those currently without an eSATA interface but who want to look to the future, but most potential buyers of this drive will fancy their chances with the more modern interface if they have SATA II installed.
We recently covered one possibility in that regard when we reviewed the Belkin SATA II ExpressCard. But the desktop PC user, whose computer does not currently feature this interface, could also consider one of the add-on cards that work out of an available PCI Express slot, such as the Belkin SATA II RAID 2-port card, F5U197ea, which would let them use an internal SATA II drive and an external one - like this Iomega Professional - simultaneously.
The drive comes equipped with both types of interface cable, plus a power supply unit, and a manual which spells out the correct order of making the connections. What the manual doesn't really cover very well is the drive's dismount procedure, simply stating that to avoid data loss the computer should be shut down when dismount of the drive is required.
Drive dismount is to clear the caches which, in the case of USB, would be achieved via the familiar 'safely remove' function, and without which data integrity would be at risk. But to have to shut down the computer simply to dismount the drive could be seen as something of a pain; that is, unless the drive could be left more or less permanently attached to the computer so that it didn't have to be dismounted while powered up.
To the rescue
Fortunately, shut down may not be necessary because some SATA II controllers, such as the Silicon Image controller in the Belkin ExpressCard, can be disabled via Device Manager to achieve essentially hot plug capability. You may think, if you do a Web search, that in order to restart a SATA II ExpressCard controller you need to disconnect everything on the drive, interface leads and power, and remake the connections, but that does not reset the controller.
What's needed, in appropriate cases, is to re-enable the SATA controller in Device Manager, selecting the appropriate drive. Well, Iomega couldn't hope to cater for every controller type, hence the catch-all but potentially painful shutdown procedure they and others recommend. You'd have to check your own SATA controller though. The drive survived a hibernation without loss of functionality, so that's our usual way out of the dilemma.
You can also dismount an external SATA II drive via 'safely remove'; it appears in the list alongside your USB devices. You can break and then remake the ExpressCard connection in order to re-establish a connection to the external device, but the downside of that procedure, of course, is extra wear and tear on the card's port if you do it routinely, but we found it preferable for intermittent use.
The Iomega Professional drive worked well using either interface connection, though the use of eSATA gave us appreciable gains over USB 2.0 in simple data transfer applications, as we show below. The Professional's case is essentially the same as the Iomega Prestige drive that we reviewed some time ago, with the same bright, flashing activity LED, power switch, and base on which to stand the drive vertically and thus take up less desk space.
It ran quietly after the initial startup, and cool, too. Unfortunately, its two-pin power plug needed the attachment of a (provided) adapter to cater for a standard UK 13A three-pin socket. Those two-pin plugs don't make as solid a connection as a three-pin power plug, so you have to watch that - or cut it off and attach to your own three-pin (with appropriate fuse).
The drive was recognised within seconds of switching on, and it worked flawlessly on our Vista test machine, connecting through either USB or an eSATA adapter.
Software provisions
With this Professional drive, Iomega makes available, via a download, backup software called Never Down. This is a program for totally backing up your computer, system and all, so that you can actually boot from your external backup drive if you suffer unbootable corruption of the main drive on your system.
That's useful, although until you restore your system from the backup you're stuck with using the backup disk as your system drive. The usual procedure of booting from a restore CD and selecting a backup file to restore may hold equal attraction, we feel, provided checks are made periodically that the boot CD is still working satisfactorily and that you're not desperate to get back into the action so quickly.
Indeed, the main attraction of the Never Down process is that you can be back in action that much quicker. All subsequently added data becomes part of the restoration file when the times comes to get your main drive functional again with a system restore.
Performance
Preformatted NTFS, the 7200rpm, 3.5 inch Seagate drive of the Iomega Professional was subjected to performance tests using both eSATA and USB interfaces. Theoretically, data transfer rates using this SATA connection could be as much as 6.25x as fast as USB 2.0. In practice, of course, there are bottlenecks that often over-ride this advantage to varying degrees, depending on the application. We compared data transfer rates while copying a batch of small video files, and repeated that with a batch of small music files.
In actual practice, then, the speed advantage of employing eSATA over USB 2.0 can be expected to be much lower than theoretical. We found a typical doubling of the rate, though absolute rates were, as expected, nowhere near that which is theoretically possible. Nevertheless, a doubling of the rate in practice is not to be sniffed at, and speed freaks will lap it up.
Having said that, apart from simple data transfer, a typical application of an external drive is for backup of the primary drive(s) of the computer. Here, the writing of data to the external drive is a relatively insignificant part of the overall task. Much more work is done in reading and then compressing the files for the backup archive, so we would expect to see a much smaller advantage in using a fast interface for the data transfer part of the job. This we confirmed, and saw only an 8.5% gain in backup time by using eSATA rather that USB 2.0, i.e. for comparison with the table above, a positive factor of 1.085. Don't expect miracles on all fronts from SATA II, then.
In conclusion
The cool running 7200rpm Seagate disk of the Iomega Professional 1TB external drive was found to be quiet in operation, with the all-important and decently-sized activation LED in the now familiar rear side of the casing, as on the Iomega Prestige model.
Apart from the minor hassle of having to disable the eSATA controller through Device Manager, or the 'safely remove' wizard, prior to dismounting the drive when that interface was used, all went swimmingly, and we believe that enthusiasts will welcome the not inconsiderable speed advantage of the SATA II interface over USB 2.0 for data transfer if their computer is suitable equipped. Nothing close to theoretical speeds in absolute terms, as we pointed out, but a sufficient advantage in practical terms to make the new design most welcome.
The backup software provided was also desirable, and many will take advantage of the free download Never Down program to quickly rescue themselves if disaster strikes their main drive. Alternatively, there's always EMC's Retrospect to fall back on as a different free download, and there's 2GB of MozyHome online storage thrown in.
