Labs

Iomega's 1.5TB UltraMax Pro consists of two removable, tray-mounted 750GB hard disks, which can be configured as RAID 0 or RAID 1. You do this by flipping a tiny set of dip switches on the back of the drive and pressing the pinhole reset button, which also erases the drives. It's fiddly, and we would prefer a simple software utility.

When configured as RAID 0 and connected using eSATA, the UltraMax was impressively fast at copying large files, although it was slower than three of the FireWire 400 disks in our small-files test. Its overall write speeds over USB were near the bottom of the group.

When configured as RAID 1 and connected using eSATA, its large-file transfer speeds were similar to those of a FireWire 800 disk, but its small-file copy speeds were only just better than those of the fastest USB disks.

The UltraMax is good value at just 20p per gigabyte. It's not that fast, but it's a great buy if you want the redundancy of a RAID 1 array.