Up and running in less than 10 minutes
Written: Jan 25 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great price, USB 1.1 compatible, good utilities included.
Cons: Odd little screech noise every 10 minutes. (Just a nit....)
The Bottom Line: I definitely recommend this drive... you can't beat the value for the money.
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| stocks_watcher's Full Review: Iomega HDD External Desktop 80 GB USB 2.0 Hard Dri... |
I have a P3-500 machine that came with a 20GB hard drive, which is plenty of space for my day-to-day needs. Previously, we had another computer in the house which had 2 hard drives in it, and I was backing up both machines to the extra disk in the second machine.
However, that machine is now gone and I needed a new place to backup my machine to. After a little looking around, an external hard drive seemed to be the answer. I wound up choosing this Iomega 80GB model because of price ($134 at Buy.com, plus there's a $30 rebate so final cost is $104), and because it is backwards compatible with USB 1.1.
It took me less than 10 minutes from the time I opened the box to have it up and running. Just install the drives from the included CD and then connect the USB cable... my PC (runs Win98SE) recognized the drive right away and it was immediately available.
The drive comes with Norton Ghost 2003, which is an excellent utility. I promptly installed Ghost and used it to backup my entire system to the external disk. I had a few problems with Ghost being able to boot my PC into DOS mode for the backup, but that's really a separate issue from the hardware.
The drive also comes with Iomega's backup software, but I didn't bother installing it. Apparently it can "watch" your internal drives and whenever you change a file it will mirror the changes to the external drive so you always have a live copy, but this wasn't what I wanted.
The drive does make a curious little noise every 10 minutes on the dot... the first time I heard it I thought there was a cat meowing outside. The drive seems to be functioning fine and the access time is very good, in spite of my machine using a USB 1.1 bus.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
stocks_watcher
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Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
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