Iomega eGo Portable 320GB

Full Review

Iomega’s casing of this portable drive is fairly innovative, with the emphasis seemingly on it being “thinner” even if its other dimensions haven’t been reduced that much. This is a mainstream portable USB hard disk from Iomega, and performs about as well as the USB 2.0 interface will allow it to. Its software bundle (Iomega Protection Suite, which is downloadable from their website) includes features for backing up files from your HDD or to an online location, and a basic anti-virus/anti-spyware application.

Its software includes features for backing up files from your HDD or to an online location, and a basic anti-virus/anti-spyware application.

The drive in synthetic benchmarks gave a read speed average of 31.1 MB/s and write speed average of 30.7 MB/s. The read access time averaged 18 ms. The CPU usage is negligible on any recent PC hardware. Real-world write tests consisted of copying a number of small files (1.81 GB , 31 files of varying sizes), and one single large file (over 2 GB in size), from a fast desktop hard drive to the portable drive under testing. Speeds here averaged 24 MB/s and 31 MB/s respectively. Real-world read speed (copying multiple files from portable drive to desktop HDD) stood at 31 MB/s.

The easy Plug ‘n’ Play installation allows it to work right out of the box without any drivers being required, whether on Windows, Linux, or a Mac. As with most portable drives, it comes formatted with the FAT32 file-system by default, and not NTFS. On a Windows OS, this can mean performance is slightly slower than what it could have been, and that you can’t store single files larger than 4 GB. You can fix this by simply re-formatting the drive with the NTFS file-system. Iomega offers a warranty of five years upon this drive.

Bottom Line

This Iomega drive features an innovatively designed case, but scored slightly lower in application benchmarks. Like all the other drives, it offers software for backing up files (Iomega Protection Suite), but adds the ability to backup online and to protect your PC from viruses/spyware.