In the heavy computer users' world, there's rarely a time when storage of some form isn't at a premium. Likewise, when it comes to undertaking effective backups, even a 4.7GB capacity DVD drive can struggle to cope with the size of the modern hard drive.

Both these scenarios are well served by Iomega's latest addition to its external hard drive range. The 250GB capacity is a big step up, given that other members of the same family are available in 40GB, 80Gb and 120GB incarnations.

The inclusion of Norton Ghost 2003 (a program that takes a complete image backup of your hard drive) gives a fair clue as to where Iomega is targeting this drive, as does the copy of Iomega's Automatic Backup application. Clearly the capacity of the product lends itself to the purpose of backups, but then so does the convenience of it.

Straight out the box, it's theoretically a breeze to use. It requires a power supply and a lead to your computer - whether you choose to employ FireWire, USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 to get things going - and that's supposedly it.

However, one of our test PCs didn't want to play ball, and despite the machine recognising the drive, it wouldn't assign it a drive letter. This gave us a chance to test Iomega's support; after two minutes on the Web site we had the problem licked. In the case of our test unit, the drive didn't come pre-formatted as promised on the box, but a right click on 'My Computer' on the Start Menu, and a quick jump into the Manage options and we were sorted.

After that, the drive appeared with its own letter within 'My Computer' (and it then worked fine with every other machine), and you're free to treat it as you would any other hard drive. Furthermore, it's quite a portable device, and it's straightforward to disconnect it from one PC and get it hooked up to another.

Credit must go to Iomega here for covering the bases. Inside the box comes the unit, the software, the necessary leads and also a couple of easy to follow user guides. Plus that online support was genuinely helpful. But, when all's said and done, how does it perform in practice?

Well, that pretty much depends on the kind of connection you're employing. We tested the unit with both USB 1.1 and USB 2.0, and in both cases the drive was instantly picked up. As you'd expect, USB 1.1 performs a lot slower, giving performance of up to 12Mb/s, while across USB 2.0 things ran nearly five times faster. These are the speeds quoted on the side of the box, and we couldn't quite match them for continuous transfer, but we weren't too far off.

Despite our initial difficulties, there's little doubt that once up and running, Iomega's solution works a treat. It's the sheer magnitude of the storage it offers that justifies the price, which equates to around 1 per gigabyte (admittedly more expensive than recordable DVDs, but there you're stuck with 4.7GB a time and slower recording times). With the useful software bundle too, this is a good deal.

Verdict
A couple of early grumbles apart, this is an able, robust and professional storage solution, that earns a recommendation for its portability and sheer quantity of storage. It's ideal for backing up the data on today's ever growing hard drives.

Company: Iomega

Contact: 020 7216 0003

Tags: iomega universal serial bus hard disk drive start menu ieee 1394 interface backup network-attached storage storage