Iomega’s eGo drive looks oddly chunky in its rubber anti-shock swaddling, but if you wish you can remove it, to expose a tasteful little lozenge of a drive, available in a choice of four colours.
The drive comes partitioned into a regular volume and a small virtual CD partition containing Iomega’s encryption client. This makes it easy to access protected data on any PC, and if you don’t want the feature you can disable it or remove it at the click of a button. The eGo also comes with access to a downloadable set of backup tools and a free, year-long subscription to Trend Micro Internet Security – our A-Listed security suite.
In our tests, the 500GB eGo gave others a run for their money in the large-file exercises. Performance dipped a little in the small-file write test, but small-file read performance was excellent, all but equalling the much more expensive LaCie.
In all, it’s a fine drive, the only slight hitch being the price. The 500GB and 750GB models cost a notch more than the cheapest options, although the 1TB model is good value at $132. There’s a new 1.5TB model coming too, but we expect it to sell for exponentially more than the current capacities do. It’s distinctly thicker and heavier than the 500GB model, but we were able to test one and saw much-improved write speeds – up to 146MB/sec in the large-file write test, and 68MB/sec in the small-file test.
