iomega eGo Portable Hard Drive product reviews

I have reviewed and used many portable (and some not so portable) storage devices over the last few years, and this has to be one of the most stylish devices I have seen for a while, it's slim, it's streamlined and the colour (Ruby Red in this case) was perfect. Also the inclusion of USB 2.0, Firewire 400 & Firewire 800 were great inovations, this small feature means it can be used with just about any hardware available on the market today (and before you ask, no it will not run on your classic Pentium 50 running Windows 98), it does however run on Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Windows 7 seamlessly.

The unit we got to test was the 320GB version, however be assured there should be no differences between this version and the larger 500GB (apart from the increase in disk space obviously). Unlike some other units I have used, this little beauty is very quiet and doesn't get overly hot to the touch either, even after some heavy usage it stayed relatively cool.

Another thing I can attest to (although this was unintentional) was the Drop Guard feature, as it took an unfortunate tumble from the work bench to the floor whilst a tidy-up was in progress in the office, a sudden thought of oh blast, the benchmarks results were on there, hope I can get the data back, well I plugged it in, prayed to whatever IT demi gods I could think of and hey presto, it worked as if it hadn't moved at all. Note: this happened when the unit was in a powered down state, I cannot attest to how it will managed if still powered up and running at the time.

Right, now that I have mentioned the benchmarks I suppose you want to hear them.

First of all only the USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 have been tested as the test PC with the Firewire 800 port in had decided to blow a fuse (and many other parts) earlier in the week so unfortunately I was unable to see how that would perform.

First up USB 2.0 - Both these tests were performed on the same PC with a 500MB test file, the totals were averaged over a total of 9 separate transfers.

Read speed was a respectable 34.90MB/s (megabytes per second) or 279.2 mbps (megabits per second)
Write speed was a bit slower at 28.34MB/s or 226.72mbps however as with all devices writing will always be slower, but in this case the difference wasn't that great.

Now for the Firewire 400 - Once again this was with a 500MB file and the totals were averaged over a total of 9 separate transfers.

Read speed was 16.88MB/s or 135.4mbps
Write speed was 15.91MB/s or 127.28mbps

Now i must admit the low Firewire 400 speeds did surprise me, however I suspect that due to the fact that the Firewire 400 ports were in fact running on a PCI expansion card and not direct to the motherboard (like in many Apple Mac's and many of the newer PC's) that this is the reason for the low scores, and I will endevour to retest this unit on a PC with integrated Firewire ports and advise of the benchmarks once this is done.

All in all, this is a good little performer and I just had to give it a 10/10 in the Personal Choice field as I just love the colour and the styling of it.... (Or have I already said that ? )