eGo 160GB (silver)

External or portable hard drive solutions are hardly worth a second glance, and certainly don't entice high levels of excitement. However, what you can achieve with them can definitely bring a smile to your face.

The Iomega eGo 160GB (5400rpm) portable hard drive is a ready-to-go portable hard drive solution that's even got a touch of style, so you don't look the complete nerd. The silver (at least with our review model) looks professional and sleek. The rounded edges may be a simple touch, but somehow look far more classy than the boring old rectangle design.

In our digital age, where music, movies, photos and documents are all measured in 1s and 0s, the ability to transport large amounts of data from A to B is a highly underestimated task. The Iomega eGo is small enough to slip into your pocket and is powered entirely by USB, so there's no need to lug a hefty power supply around. The USB cable has twin USB heads, and requires two USB ports if the port is not powered.

Beyond the USB cable there is nothing needed to get this device up and running. There's no software, no drivers and no installation that are required. Simply plug it in and start copying. Included with the device is a licence to the EMC Retrospect HD backup software, though you'll need to download it. This software allows you to schedule backups of pre-defined folders, and is great for securing important data.

Copying 4.12GB of data from the device to a PC took 175sec or around 23MBps. Copying data back from the PC to the device again took 259sec or about 16MBps (read speeds are typically faster than write speeds).

At 220g this device is quite easy to carry around. It feels sturdy and uses Iomega's DropGuard feature, a cushioning around the hard drive, which is designed to protect the device against sudden jarring. The drive is formatted using Fat32 by default, but we easily re-formatted to NTSC in order to handle larger files.