Friday, May 23, 2008

Portable drive iomega 120G and MacBook Pro

This is my review of Iomega Portable Hard Drive, FireWire 400/USB 2.0, 120GB Silver - 33634 on Apple MacBook Pro laptop. I'm not a hardware geek, so don't suppose this review to be very accurate from the technology stand-point. I'm a regular end-user and I just want to be happy with my gadgets. ;)

Starting from the unboxing.

Pretty nice device, pleasant for touch, pretty slim and narrow.

Has a reset button, can be switched into three power modes (USB/Firewire, Off ;) or 5V DC).

I found Firewire cable to be pretty short and nice. I remember people complaining about the length of the cable and found it to be too long. Well, not in my case. ;)

After connecting the device to the port it was found immediately. I've started the transfer of 10G folder with numerous files and Finder estimated it to about 11 or 12 minutes. However, it gave me more then 2 hours on 60G folder with about 50K of files in it. Although this is very rough and (I guess) very inaccurate, it's still much better comparing to my experiment with WD. I also tried to transfer 744M in one file and I got 9.3MB/s average. And on 4G file it gave me 15MB/s, so it speeds up a little bit. Again, I do not know if this cool or not, but it works for me well.

When I clicked on cancel, the transfer immediately stopped. I don't know if there is an issue or not, but I remember having hard time with different external drives that made Finder's copy stall for hours after canceling the action.

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with the device, but it'll take me some time to drive it crazy and to discover its fool-tolerance. ;)

P.S. Just found out that the device came in FAT32 and it can't accept single files more then 4G in size. I have got a few Parallels images about 8G long and I can't put them on the device.

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