Iomega's eGo external HDD is a perfect combination of speed and capacity for mobile users, having the latest USB 3.0 interface, and a whopping 1 TB capacity. The good thing about this drive is that Iomega also offers a USB 3.0 ExpressCard adapter, which will allow users with USB 2.0 on their notebooks to benefit from the high transfer speeds of USB 3.0. You can read more about USB 3.0 and the kinds of transfer rates and other benefits that it offers in the PCQuest March 2010 issue, or you can read it online at www.ld2.in/11c.
Price: iOmega eGo: Rs. 6499(3 year warranty), USB 3.0 ExpressCard: Rs. 2000 |
Features
Besides USB 3.0, the eGo also features hardware supported encryption and toughness. It comes with Iomega Encryption Utility that uses AES 256-bit hardware encryption and lets the user to password protect the drive. The bundled USB 3.0 ExpressCard adapter has two USB 3.0 interfaces arranged next to each other. Simply plug it in the notebook's 34mm expresscard slot, install the necessary drivers, and your notebook will be USB 3.0 ready. Use the two ports to transfer data between the drive and your notebook.
There's a Drop Guard Xtreme feature that protects the drive even if you drop it from up to 7 feet. The pre-installed Power Grip band wraps the drive and provides shock protection against slight bumps and drops.
Performance
We were obviously curious to know the performance difference between USB 2.0 and 3.0, to see whether the new interface is really worth the extra 2k you pay for it. We setup the ExpressCard adapter on a Windows 7 64-bit based notebook having 4GB RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1 GHz processor. We used CrystalDiskMark 3.0 to measure sequential read/write speeds and HDTune to measures the average transfer rate. Besides these, we also transferred 2.53 GB of data consisting mostly of MP3s, movies and executable files. Across the benchmarks, we found nearly three fold difference in transfer speeds when USB 3.0 is used.
Bottomline: The extra 2k you pay for USB functionality with the drive is definitely worth it for users who need to constantly transfer large amounts of data. The 6.5k price tag for 1 TB capacity is also worth it.
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