Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
HaLoads of storage space |
| Disadvantages: |
Annoying blue light |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
I have had my PC for two years now and just recently I managed to fill my 80 GB hard drive up with rubbish. There was so much rubbish on it the hard drive was having problems reading the data. It was so full that I didn't even have enough free space to do a defragmentation of the drive. Anyhow with my birthday looming just around the corner my girlfriend said that I could have a new hard drive as an early present. I only wanted a 100 GB hard drive but after I had had a browse around I discovered that I could get the Iomega 250 GB external hard drive for the same price.
The hard drive itself is silver and has a clear blue strip across the front. The Iomega logo is clearly embossed on the top and underneath there is four rubber feet. There is also two vents one each side to draw in cool air.
Specifications:
USB 2.0 Transfer Rate: 400 Mbits/s
Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM
Memory Cache: 8 MB or greater
Dimensions:
Length: 22cm, Width: 12cm, Depth: 3.3cm, Weight: 1.1kg
The Packaging is very good. The components are all plastic sealed and the hard drive is secured by two pieces of polystyrene.
Inside the package is the hard drive, a power cable, USB cable and a quick installation guide. Also to my surprise there was a little stand as well so you can have the hard drive vertically or horizontally.
The installation guide is very basic it tells you how to plug it in, some troubleshooting tips and a one year limited warranty. It is easily readable and is in 8 different languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
It is plug and play so all you have to do is plug it in and off you go, no drivers are required.
Once it is plugged in and ready, you will need to turn it on. There is an on of button situated at the back to do this. When it is on a bright blue neon light will go on at the front.
When all this is done you will need to locate the drive. To do this go to My computer on your PC and the drive shall be located there as Drive (*) IOMEGA_HHD.
System requirements:
32mb RAM, CD-ROM Drive, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 / Netscape 6.1 or higher browser, Pentium II or equivalent processor or more and Windows 200/XP Home/ XP Professional. If you are using a Mac you will need G3 or higher with built in USB connection and you will require Mac OS X or higher.
Pros & Cons
The first thing I noticed about the hard drive was how heavy it is. It must weigh as much as a house brick. I was expecting something half the weight of it considering it is a portable device.
The blue light on the front is annoying because it is too bright and keeps glaring in my spectacles and leaving floaters in my eyes.
The most annoying thing about it though is that the actual hard drive space is only 232 GB and not the 250 GB that it states it is. So in total you lose out on 18 whooping GB of Hard drive space. How rude.
On the positive side though I have found the stand very handy for saving space on my desktop and it fit nicely in my bag for transportation.
Price
I think that this was a bargain at only £69.99 from Staples, but if you are think of buying one you must hurry because the offer runs out this weekend 5/11/06
My thoughts
I like my hard drive. I can store my music, photos and data files on it. It looks smart and modern and is easy to use.
So far I have managed to fill up over a quarter of the space and have also used it to copy the information on two hard drives for a friend so he could put all his files on his new computer without having to burn them all onto discs.
I think this is very cheap considering that it cost the same price as 160 GB Hard Drive of EBay and with 164 GB of free space still I should imagine that I will not need another hard drive for quite some time now
Further Information:
Go to www. Iomega.com
Thanks for reading
This product has not yet been reviewed. 
