// Home / Reviews / Peripherals / External hard drives

Iomega Professional External Hard Drive in External hard drives

Gallery

Verdict

A solid, do-everything drive with excellent performance

Review Date: 19 Aug 2009

Price when reviewed: £80 (£92 inc VAT)

Buy it now for: £78.95

Overall Rating
6 stars out of 6

Features & Design
6 stars out of 6

Value for Money
5 stars out of 6

Performance
6 stars out of 6

PCPRO Recommended

Iomega’s desktop offering is a brushed-aluminium slab with a perforated front that echoes the design of the Mac Pro, an impression the clean white activity light does little to dispel. But the product is firmly focused on the PC market: it comes formatted as NTFS, which OS X can’t read, and it doesn’t support Apple’s beloved FireWire.

What it does support is eSATA – the external variant of the SATA interface used for internal drives – and this opens up performance far in excess of what’s possible with USB. Via eSATA, the Iomega completed our 3,000-file read and write tests in just 16 seconds – half the time taken by even the fastest USB drives. The 3GB file test was even more impressive, slashing the USB record of 3mins 18 secs down to just 51 seconds. So if your PC’s equipped with the appropriate port, there’s a compelling argument right there to pick this model.

But even leaving eSATA aside, it’s still a super-fast drive: with a USB connection it achieved excellent average read and write speeds of 29.3MB/sec and 14.7MB/sec in our small files tests, and an equally impressive 33.1MB/sec and 24.8MB/sec with our larger files.

Of course, if you just want simple storage there are cheaper options. Although street prices for the Professional Hard Drive are pleasingly lower than the £91 exc VAT SRP, you’re still looking at 9p per gigabyte.

But the Iomega feels like a more professional choice, with a real power switch at the back and a stand for vertical or horizontal orientation. And, as with the portable eGo drive, the bundled software isn’t bad either: we particularly like Iomega’s NeverDown, which backs up your system so completely that you can actually boot it from the external drive should a disaster completely wipe your main disk.

Even without eSATA, the Professional Hard Drive would be a persuasive package (and in fact Iomega offers such an option, in the form of the USB-only Prestige model). But if your PC can take advantage of the stunning performance benefits of eSATA, it’s irresistible.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith

Comments

User comments

Reliable?

I had an Iomega external HD once. It was great, while it worked.

By Lacrobat on 19 Aug 2009

Always great!

I have always used IOMega drives - never had a problem at all with reliability (never consider speed etc... not important really!).

By JamesMitch on 19 Aug 2009

IOmega products

I took an oath never ever to touch an Iomega product again after my experience of the "Click of Death" with their !Click drive. I lost a load of valuable photos while their support denied a widespread problem. So however attractive the ads, I have kept my vows.

By zmail on 20 Aug 2009

Iomega: gone & clearly forgotten. . .

It really does beggar belief that a publication as reputable as PC Pro could feature Iomega on its A List.

Iomega was at the centre of a world-wide 'click of death' scandal which even necessitated Steve Gibson having to come to the rescue.

Iomega persistently denied any problem with its products, yet those product persistently failed.

It seems the PC Pro reviewing team have had no experience of this company or its products in the past -- or its customer treatment.

For the many of us who have, an Iomega product goes on the Z List -- not the A List.

By globerad on 28 Aug 2009

@globerad

1. This is an external hard disk, not a jazz or a zip drive, so the click of death was specific to that family of products.

2. Steve Gibson is a self serving scaremonger who makes mountains out of molehills in order to sell himself and wares

3. The problems you describe about Iomega are at least a decade old

4. PCPRO's history goes way back and recognises the technology and companies CHANGE.

5. If PCPRO think that THIS product is good enough to be on the A-LIST then I believe that faulty products from 10 years ago shouldn't affect it.

By jonty on 6 Sep 2009

Prices below are inconsistent

I just thought I'd mention, having clicked on some of the 6 supplier links below, that as of today (11.9.09) these prices are not consistent with each other. The DELL for business price excludes VAT & delivery. Some of the other prices include VAT, some include VAT & delivery. Therefore the first one on the list is not actually the cheapest.

By joebww on 11 Sep 2009

NeverDown can be NeverUP

Recently purchased the Iomega 1TB esata external hard drive principally because of the recommendation of the NeverDown back-up software.
In my case it was never up as I couldn't obtain a single complete back-up.
Iomega support are aware that there is an issue, at least with their Vista 64bit version which they haven't fixed and aren't going to fix apparently because they are not developing the software further. I hope noone else buys the drive for the reasons I did.

By jrpfence on 24 Sep 2009

NeilS

Ordered one from Dell. Plugged it inot 3 machines (4 year old dell, Lenovo T61 and Samsung NC10)via USB none recognised it. Contacted Iomega who diagnosed it DOA. They wanted me to ship it to the Netherlands to get replacement. COntacted Dell who shipped a new one. Same result. Am I doing something worng, did Dell get a bad batch or should I just give it up as a lost cause.

By NeilS on 5 Nov 2009

Leave a comment

You need to Login or Register to comment.