Lacie’s 250GB external hard disk was our favoured external hard disk for over a year so it was good to see a direct competitor challenge it. As one of Iomega’s deluge of new products this month, the Desktop Hard Drive 250GB sports an, erm... 250GB Seagate hard disk with 8MB buffer, in a quality metal enclosure, with vented plastic sides and an external power lead. Rounded sides necessitate the bundled stand for vertical operation.

In our tests it wrote 100MB of large files at 28.6MB/s (Lacie: 22.8MB/s) and 100MB of small files at 2.6MB/s (Lacie 1.9MB/s). The average seek time is 15.5ms (Lacie: 10.6ms) and its average sustained transfer rate was 32.8MB/s (Lacie: 34.7MB/s). It’s very quiet in operation and, at $206 (96c per GB), is a similar price to the Lacie. This, and superior, real-world transfer performance makes it a winner this month.