Product Reviews

Until recently, the highest capacity you could get from any of Iomega's storage products was just 20Gb. That may sound a lot, but even consumer products like the iPod can offer that much storage.

If you're a professional designer, musician or video editor, you can fill 20Gb worth of hard disk space before lunch. So instead of altering its overpriced 10Gb and 20Gb Peerless cartridges, Iomega has finally taken the plunge into the hard disk market and come up with the well-endowed HDD 120Gb.

There's nothing particularly original about the HDD: it's just a big hard disk. However, it performs well and is much more reasonably priced than Iomega's Peerless products.

The drive is available in two versions, with either a FireWire or USB 2.0 interface. The 7200rpm drive unit is the same in both cases, and it's only the interface cable included in the box that sets them apart. The drive unit is fairly compact, measuring about 12cm x 18cm x 4cm. There's a single LED on the upper face of the silver and grey unit, which flashes to indicate when the data transfer is taking place.

Both the FireWire and USB models need their own power supply, but this isn't a significant problem. It's a little strange, though, that there's no On/Off switch on the unit. This means the only way to turn it off is to unplug the mains cable, which seems rather clumsy.

Crash course

The

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installation process wasn't exactly elegant either. The skimpy manual provided with the drive seems to have been written with PC users in mind, and we were confused about the software provided with the drive. The software CD features Iomega's QuikSync back-up software and, for no reason we can think of, the MusicMatch Jukebox MP3 player.

The first time we connected the USB drive, we thought that the Mac had crashed and we restarted the machine several times, before we realised that we just had to sit and wait a bit longer. Fortunately, this problem didn't occur with the FireWire version of the drive. The FireWire model is only £10 more expensive, and its performance is vastly superior to that of the USB model, so there's no reason for Mac users to buy the USB version.

The problem here is that the USB model is designed to be used with a USB 2.0 interface. Macs don't have USB 2.0, although the drive is also compatible with the USB 1.1 standard found on modern Macs.

However, the drive's performance will be hindered by the slower USB 1.1 interface, which can't handle more than between 700Kb and 800Kb of data a second. That speed is no use if you're working with gigabytes worth of data, so we'd suggest that Mac users stick with the FireWire version wherever possible.

When connected to a Mac with a FireWire port, the HDD managed a sustained data transfer rate of almost 10Mb a second, which should be more than adequate for all but the most demanding video editing work. That speed also puts it slightly ahead of rivals, such as LaCie's 120Gb D2 drive. However, the HDD is slightly more expensive than the LaCie drive, so you would need to decide whether you're prepared to pay a little more for that extra speed.

We'd like to see Iomega providea better manual and installation software for Mac users, but, apart from those small glitches, the HDD is a good option for any professional user who needs to add lots of storage to their desktop machine.