Iomega Prestige Portable 1TB There's no doubt but that the Iomega Prestige is a looker. And with 1TB of hard disk storage on board, it's at the current peak of portable hard drive capacity. The styling, as you can see from the pictures, is all gunmetal-coloured brushed steel, with a Mac Pro speaker-grille pattern of small holes punched into the front …
I had an Iomega REV drive 35Gb internal several years ago. At the time there wasn't much choice for home backup below enterprise DAT drives. Not only did it use some crappy proprietary implementation of the UDF file system - so it looked like a 35Gb rewritable DVD, rather than a removable hard drive - but the drivers to enable all this were horribly unreliable and would often blue screen during backups.
After two years of moderate use (one full back up a week, filling a 35Gb cart) It finally gave up the ghost exactly one month after the two year warranty expired.
Since the drive was completely dead I couldn't even sell the three 35Gb carts on eBay (~£40 each when new) I had as I had no verifiable way to secure erase them! I had to smash the platter with a screw driver and take them to the dump along with the drive.
I know that with an external USB HDD its all standardised and modern OS's usually have the driver built in; and as always YMMV. But on reliability alone I'd never touch another Iomega product again!
Learn some statistical presentation skills, Tony. The graphics were dire - why are you treating a small number of independent variables (ie seq read, seq write, 512KB read and 512KB write as if they were part of a continuous variable by linking them together in a line graph? What does the line between a value for Seq Read and Seq Write represent anyway? A reading for half-read and half-write? Not reading and not writing? Similarly for the lines between 4KB read and 4KB Write in the second graphic - is it a transition from 4KB Read through not reading and not writing up to 4KB Write?
As these variables are independent, perhaps bar charts would be better: I'm sure I remember seeing some used for just such a purpose some time ago ... And the cut-off axes to over-emphasise the differences between the devices ... oh dear.
I suppose we should be grateful that it hasn't all been lumped into a 3-D pie chart with perspective. Now THAT is the mark of a total incompetent. Which may be why it's a default in Excel ...
<-- Mine's the one with the copy of Edward R Tufte's 'Visual Display of Quantitative Information' inthe pocket.
Why should I respect your judgement, given you bought a non propriety format... I mean, what use is a backup if you're dependant on a rare drive to retrieve it?
Also, don't think much of the logic re: all iomega products ever.... it's like me saying I'm never buying a Ford again because the Edsel was rubbish. Understandable if it's a run of one terrible product after the other, but any given company has the ability to produce a pup, and considered buying decisions should be made on that basis.
Do not buy any disk drive product that does not include at least a 3 year guarantee. If the maker is not confident that the drive will last that long why should you be ? With external drives make sure that includes the power supply brick as those are prone to failure as well.
Apart from the customer forums Iomega has a "product in warranty" only support policy. I bought an Iomega 1TB drive on the day OSX Leopard and Time machine were released. It's dead and gone now thanks to the failing PS brick killing the enclosure electronics. That drive cost me over £100 per year of service.
Gannett
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