Labs

'Industrial' might be a more appropriate word than 'Professional' to describe this well built drive. The brushed aluminium case is reassuringly solid. A dark strip along the front hides a small LED that glows blue when the drive is being accessed.

The design is practical as well as eye-catching: it

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comes with a little plastic stand, so you can prop it on its side if you prefer, and at the back there's a proper on/off switch - much nicer than the unsatisfactory buttons on the Seagate and WD drives.

You get two bundled software packages: Iomega's Never Down lets you back up your entire system to the drive, and boot from it in case of disaster, while EMC Retrospect deals with everyday data backups. And, though it comes formatted as one big drive, the manual supplied on CD provides instructions for more advanced users to partition it into smaller volumes.

With a USB connection it proved a strong performer, doing particularly well with large files, and when we switched to eSATA it was the fastest of the bunch. Unlike some competitors, Iomega includes an eSATA cable in the box.

At £99 the Professional Hard Drive isn't the cheapest option, but it has a lot going for it.