My machine is a MacBook Pro 15", Intel Core 2 Duo with 150 GB Fujitsu hard drive. I purchased this laptop a little over a year ago and it has worked like a champ. This is my second Mac and first with OSX tiger installed.
I decided that it was time to find an external hard drive and start doing some serious backing up. I turned to Amazon.com because I have purchased many computer related items here without any complaints.
My older Mac Power PC came with an Iomega zip drive and it has never given me any trouble. Back in the days before writable discs, when most removable storage was on floppies, Iomega zips were a God sent. When I came upon an Iomega 1TB external drive, I decided on my past experience with Iomega to go ahead and purchase one. The price was right where I wanted it to be ($106).
I Goggled it to see what others might have to say and was pleased with the good and was understandable with the bad. One of the negative comments was that Iomega does not manufacture hard drives so there is no way to determine before hand what would be installed. Another commented that it was preloaded for Windows and he had trouble getting it to work with a Mac and that there were no instructions included to tell how to reformat the hard drive. After reading everything, I still thought that I'd made the right choice.
The unit arrived and I was impressed with it right out of the box and it did come with instructions on how to reformat. It has only USB 2 for connection to the machine (cord included). But, that worked out alright for me since everything else I have is connected through hubs. The desk adaptor allows the brushed aluminum housing to be set on the table in an upright position on it's side which looks great. The plug in power transformer comes with a sufficiently long cord to reach to my power strip with ease.
It's icon came right up on the desktop when I turned it on. Disk Utility indicated that the drive is an Hitachi. Reformatting for Mac was a snap with the enclosed instructions. Just be sure to select the lower icon in Disk Utility, the one that is named and be sure you check all the boxes.
So much for the mechanics, now comes the setting it up for use. Iomega includes what it calls a "free license for an EMC Retrospect Backup product to best fit your needs". The numbers are printed in the sales pitch included. I had been using a trial version of iGeek's Data Backup with Mobile Me. It was working alright, but I thought, holy smokes, EMC Retrospect for free. So I went for the download and loaded the application. The GUI really wasn't that much different. The workings were a little more difficult to set up than Data Backup. However, when I went back in to do some tweaking, it again asked me for the license number. When I entered the number provided, the response was "This license number is incorrect. Please try again.". ARRGGG. Three more tries and I put AppCleaner to work. That was the end of Retrospect. I went back to Data Backup and purchased the full version. By the way, I got a heck of a good price on Amazon.
That's my story of how it went with Iomega on Thursday. It is now Saturday afternoon and it's still sitting on my desk, looking, and feeling, cool. Backup 3 did an excellent job cloning my hard drive. I've been slipping files in and out without a hitch. So, would I say buy it? Based on my experience so far, I would say... Yes.
Gotta go, Good Luck.Get more detail about Iomega Prestige 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive 34275.
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