Iomega 40 GB External HDD

This portable external hard drive one from Iomega is slim, weighs only 230 grams, and can easily be carried in your shirt pocket. The model we reviewed had a spindle speed of 4200 rpm. Though this is low, it’s also the default most notebook hard drives ship with today. 

The drive comes with both FireWire and USB 1.1/2.0 interfaces. It requires external power for USB access, but draws power from the PC for FireWire. There’s Iomega Automatic Backup and Norton Ghost 2003 as bundled software. The former has a host of good features for business users like support for different profiles to backup important data first. 

Though this drive can be physically protected from theft with its Kensington security slot, we missed having a similar feature for data. It would be nice if drive access could also be password protected. We tested the drive with its USB 2.0 interface, and measured its transfer rates using HDTach. It gave a burst read speed of 31.2 MBps, and max/min read speeds of 24.4/8.8 MBps, translating to an average 20.25 MBps. We also tried backing up 10 GB of regular office files to it, and it took about 23 min to complete. Reading the same data from it took around 12 min. This translates to a throughput of 7.4 MBps and 14 MBps respectively, which are slightly lower than what HDTach showed.

S N   A   P   S   H O   T
Price	:	Rs 15,000 (one-year warranty)
Key specs	:	High capacity, highly portable, good software bundle
Contact	:	Neoteric Informa-tique, Delhi.
Tel	:	26433549/ 50.
E-mail	:	manish@neoteric-info.com

Overall, it’s a good choice for those who need a high capacity, highly portable solution.

Geetaj Channana