Want a decent External USB2 HDD? look here!

[mrk]

Today arrived an Iomega 320GB USB2 hdd for the price of £55 and below is a small write-up which I think will be helpful to someone also looking for a quiet but fast hdd for backups/day to day usage.

Retail Packaging
Packaged nicely as you'd expect from any retail packing.

Drive Casing
The case is brushed aluminium, it feels smooth but also sharp. The Iomega logo is engraved on one side. It cannot be missed

Installation
The drive comes with no CD unlike other external drives, it was a breeze to install, plug in, power on and Vista did the rest.

Drive Inside
Device manager reports the drive as a ST3320820A which is a Seagate ATA100 7200.10 drive - this is quite re-assuring as my existing SATAII disks are both 7200.10 models and are equally fast/silent.

Performance
I intend to use it as a 1:1 backup solution as my second HDD is a 320GB drive and I will do weekly complete backups over to it. It contains all my documents and backup data should the OS drive die or otherwise.

I copied all the data off my M: drive (129GB) over to the new USB drive so both drives had the exact same data (this took just over an hour) and both are formatted to NTFS with the same formatted size.

Transfer rate seems good @ USB2:

Overall a great drive for £55 and I'd definitely recommend it considering the drive inside the Iomega shell is a Seagate 7200.10

 

[mrk]

And some photos:

 

[fobose]

Looks nice and cool (no pun). I bought my bro an icy box external caddy and put a 7200.9 in it (no need for a faster drive if it can only do 30-35mb/s transfer). It worked perfectly fine for a while then on my PC I got loads of write errors and even after formatting it and starting again it still wouldn't work!!! It worked on my laptop/bros laptop after that but just not on my PC - I dont trust usb drives now!

Also if you want a 1:1 backup with your PC wouldn't it have been cheaper (and easier) to just have RAID 1?

 

[james.miller]

nice looking enclosure. e-sata for the win though

 

[mrk]

Looks nice and cool (no pun). I bought my bro an icy box external caddy and put a 7200.9 in it (no need for a faster drive if it can only do 30-35mb/s transfer). It worked perfectly fine for a while then on my PC I got loads of write errors and even after formatting it and starting again it still wouldn't work!!! It worked on my laptop/bros laptop after that but just not on my PC - I dont trust usb drives now!

Also if you want a 1:1 backup with your PC wouldn't it have been cheaper (and easier) to just have RAID 1?

I really don't like Raid

My mobos USB has been very good, no issues at all and I'd also like to lug along the external to friends/family houses to transfer "data" - not easy with RAID or e-SATA as not everyone has e-SATA

 

[rpstewart]

Also if you want a 1:1 backup with your PC wouldn't it have been cheaper (and easier) to just have RAID 1?

RAID1 is not a backup!!!!

All RAID1 gives you is redundancy in the event of a hardware failure. If you delete a file on RAID1 it's gone whereas with a proper backup (like an external drive) you have a pristene copy of the file which can easily be restored to the main system.

 

[fobose]

RAID1 is not a backup!!!!

All RAID1 gives you is redundancy in the event of a hardware failure. If you delete a file on RAID1 it's gone whereas with a proper backup (like an external drive) you have a pristene copy of the file which can easily be restored to the main system.

Ok then, its a backup unless your stupid and delete your files I do actually have "my documents" saved in another folder aswell on my RAID 1 array (aswell as my dadss and bros too), so if I were to delete an important file I would still have a backup copy of it.

<edit>

..and I'd also like to lug along the external to friends/family houses to transfer "data" - not easy with RAID or e-SATA as not everyone has e-SATA

Fair point, it would sometimes be handy for me to do that as my 4gb pen drive doesn't always cut it sometimes, knew I should have spent the extra £30 for an 8GB :/

 

[rpstewart]

Ok then, its a backup unless your stupid and delete your files

Sorry but I'm going to get pedantic on this one. No RAID level provides backup facilities regardless of how you argue it, there are plenty of situations which a RAID array cannot protect you from that a proper offline backup will.

• Human error
• Data corruption due to software failure
• RAID controller failure
• Malicious intent / viruses

 

[fobose]

Touché.

I still prefer my RAID to an external USB though. e-SATA on the other hand would be different, the amount of times I have "safely removed" USB devices with files on and then the next time I plug it in it asks me to format :S

 

[Slackworth]

Nice looking drives. Will look into these tomorrow.

 

[mrk]

Nice looking drives. Will look into these tomorrow.

I did check OcUK but they did not sell them I chose it because it looked slick and the user reviews on another site praised it all the way