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  Iomega eGo Desktop Hard Drive 1TB [Review]

  Jayesh Limaye, Dec 30, 2009 1100 hrs IST

  This external hard drive looks like an oversized hip flask

  Trendy looks, excellent write and read speeds, software bundle

  A bit expensive, no carry pouch, software bundle has to be downloaded

  Check specifications

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Page 1 - Introduction, Bundle Page 2 - The Drive Page 3 - Performance Page 4 - Performance II Page 5 - Verdict Page 6 - Specifications

The Drive:

The eGo comes packed in a nice red and white cardboard box as can be seen above.

If you look at the eGo, you will definitely find it strikingly similar in shape to hip flask, only that it is an oversized one. In fact, it can be considered the larger sibling of the eGo Ruby Red, which was reviewed a few months ago. It sports a Ruby Red color casing with sparkling silver particles. It is also available in Jet Black and Midnight Blue colors. The ends have shiny steel caps with chrome finish. Overall, the build quality is top notch.

Since the casing does not have a glossy finish, it doesn't catch fingerprints. On the other hand, the steel end-caps are very capable of catching and retaining fingerprints. With a desktop hard drive inside, this drive is rather bulky and at 1.09 Kg, is not really portable.

The top steel cap of the drive has a Mini USB port, an activity LED at the center top, a socket to connect power and a power button. Unlike with an external drive with a laptop hard drive, a separate power supply is required because of the higher power requirements of the desktop hard drive.

As it can be seen above, the reported capacity of the drive in Windows Properties is 931 MB. The drive comes preformatted with NTFS and will therefore work with Windows and Linux. However, if you want to use it with a Mac, you must format it with HFS+.

The drive boasts of a 1 TB capacity, which is enough for every backup purpose. There is a 3.5-inch Seagate Barracuda LP ST310005 20AS 5900 RPM laptop hard drive inside the enclosure. The 5900 RPM means that it consumes lower power than a normal 7200 RPM hard drive and the performance hit cannot be felt because it is the USB 2.0 interface, which is the bottleneck here, and the drive inside is not much of a factor.


Software:
As mentioned before, the software is not present on the drive or bundled along, but you can download the backup software EMC Retrospect, which is available as a bundled download package with this drive, from the website. You can even use the MozyHome Online Backup software (bundled along as a downloadable package too) to backup your data online with up to 2 GB of online space, which is not much of an incentive when you consider that the drive comes with a massive 1 TB capacity.

Page 1 - Introduction, Bundle Page 2 - The Drive Page 3 - Performance Page 4 - Performance II Page 5 - Verdict Page 6 - Specifications

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