Product ReviewsRemovable Storage
Iomega has been at pains recently to demonstrate a renewed commitment to the Mac platform, and this new desktop hard disk is one of the most visible signs. Most obviously, the styling is heavily inspired by the case design originally introduced with the Power Mac G5. It's not a perfect interpretation of the desktop's enclosure - detail is a little fussy, and it lacks that perfect polish and deceptive simplicity you find with Apple-designed products - but it's good enough. More subtle, but very welcome, is the default format: it comes supplied formatted as HFS+. Windows users are instructed to reformat the drive, a task that usually falls to us Mac users. It's a good deal chunkier than most external disks, but that's because it houses two 320GB drives. Two Dip switches on the rear control how the drive uses the two units. By default, it's supplied as a 640GB Raid 0 drive (596GB available) in which alternate bits of data are written to each disk. This offers a good level of performance - for which the inclusion of FireWire 800 alongside
The Dip switches also allow you to pick JBod (which appears as one 640GB drive on the desktop, filling first one then the other disk, and is transparent to the user) and non-Raid, when two 320GB drives will show up. However, despite a switch configuration being free, Raid 1 isn't offered. We're astonished that this ability to have a constant, immediate backup of one 320GB drive to the other has been excluded. Yes, you could use Mac OS X's software Raid system to create this, but that's no excuse. There are two ports each for FireWire - 800 and 400 for daisychaining - and three downstream USB ports. Raid 0 performance is good. With FireWire 800, we recorded 60MB/sec write speeds for sequential data and 23MB/sec for more typical random data. Our testing showed that creating the same Raid system using Disk Utility gave similar transfer speeds. This means that, in theory, you could replicate this performance with two independent 320GB drives, but this would be inelegant and would almost certainly impact on the host Mac's performance. The price is reasonably competitive for this market. Western Digital's My Book Pro II (which has a triple interface, 1TB capacity and allows mirroring of its two 500GB drives) is available online for £100 more than the Iomega UltraMax, but even discounting the capacity boost, it's a more compelling proposition. We welcome Iomega's refocusing on the Mac market, and this is a passable product, but the lack of the option to mirror the drives is a silly omission. By Christopher Phin |
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