Iomega eGo Portable Hard Drive Mac Edition 500GB review

Although Iomega's Portable Hard Drive Mac Edition costs a little more than most 500GB drives, you're getting a lot for your money. With brushed aluminium sides and black plastic base and top, it looks great next to your iMac or Apple Display.

The hard drive itself is a speedy 7200rpm model, which tops the the more common 5400rpm HDDs used in most portable drives, and it boasts both FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 connectivity. A FW400- to-800 cable is included, along with a standard FW800 lead, and the USB cable has two Type A plugs for when extra power is needed.

Like most recent Iomega drives, it comes supplied with a downloadable suite of applications. You get a 12-month free subscription to Trend Micro Smart Surfing for Mac, MozyHome Online Backup (2GB free) and Iomega's own QuikProtect backup software.

You also get a Drop Guard case, which protects the drive against falls of up to seven feet, and if you download the Iomega encryption application, you can protect your data with AES 256-bit security.

The 7200rpm drive proved its worth in our benchmarking tests, where it achieved random read/write speeds of 11.175/16.519MB/s under FireWire 800, and 11.326/12.491MB/s with USB.

Our only reservation is the price. The Western Digital My Passport Studio 1TB is twice the capacity and costs less. That's not to say Iomega's is poor value for money. Far from it. But if you don't need the higher transfer speeds, you're probably better off with a larger capacity or a cheaper drive.

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