IOMEGA 250GB USB DESKTOP ( 33089 )

Rating:
Summary: High-capacity, but no way to tell it to pipe down
Review: I have the FireWire&USB version of this HDD250 drive, so you may want to check whether this variant has the same problem as that one: It's wonderous that drives are available in this capacity at this price. BUT ... this small little unit is the noisiest object in my office, which also has three computers, printers, monitors, etc., but the worst aspect of that is that it has NO POWER SWITCH. Yup, that's right. The only way to get this baby to shut up is to pull the power plug. Crawling around on the floor to get to the power strip isn't very convenient, so it's more natural to pull the plug on the back of the unit, which is a small circular jack, with a barely visible indicator to tell which end is up, and that indicator faces down, towards the desk surface. Pokin' and proddin' to get the thing back in doesn't suggest that this is going to have a long lifetime. With such hearty competition among manufacturers, why bother? Most others offer a POWER SWITCH.

Rating:
Summary: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Review: The Good
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The price. Less than $1 per GB.

Power switch. Contrary to the prior review, this model does have a power switch located in the back though it doesn't cycle off immediately.


The Bad
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Doesn't power off when idle.

Bundled software is lacking. Norton Ghost 2003 is provided, which doesn't have the nice hard disk backup features of Norton Ghost 9.0. The IOMEGA software, Automatic Backup, has not been updated since 2002. I have not yet been able to get it to work. I have had installation problems and operational problems. You have to attend backups if you have files with long names (even with Windows 2000 and XP). You will be prompted to abort retry or ignore every time there is a problem.

If you share the device on a network, the backup speed is unbearable.


The Ugly
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Really noisy. Agree with the prior review that this is likely to be the noisiest thing in your entire home.

Lots of heat. It puts out so much heat you might need to crank the A/C a touch to compensate.

Software installation. Can't ANYBODY make software that installs and works right out of the box? There are certain conditions where the memory footprint continues to grow with no obvious activity (memory leak?)


I probably should have simply purchased a high capacity hard drive, installed internally and shared on the network.