Iomega eGo 250GB

Bearing more than a passing resemblance to a hip flask, the eGo provides a whopping 250GB of portable storage. It's just about pocket-sized and is powered from most USB ports - for those times when your machine doesn't provide enough juice, the bundled mini-USB cable comes with two plugs to give it enough power. Our speed tests produced some impressive results - 14MB/sec for writing a single 100MB file, and 7MB/sec for reading it back. Small files were predictably slower - just 1.5MB/sec for writing 100MB of tiny files - but there's still enough performance for portable backup. Our only gripe is that the metallic-red finish on our unit proved all too prone to scratches, but otherwise the eGo is a good-value option.

Author: Dave Stevenson