Out of the box, the Iomega Prestige external hard drive is a looker. The dark brushed metal finish and metal case gives it a substantial feel and appearance. The drive is marked as being made in China.

As can be seen in the photos for this product, all the connections are on the back of the unit, as well as a physical power switch. Power is supplied by an external wall transformer with an output of 12V at 1.5A.

Getting the drive operational on a 64-bit Windows 7 PC was very easy and straightforward. Attach the power cord, the USB cable, and flip the power switch. After a short spin-up, the drive appears in the list of available drives in Windows. Windows responds with the normal dialog about browsing the drive’s contents, but there is also a second dialog that appears for something called “Virtual CD” which is a separate virtual drive that is xxx in size. This partition contains a 83 MB file that appears to allow for encryption on the drive.

Transfer rates for the Iomega drive via a USB 2.0 connection are on par with the Western Digital WD Elements 2 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive. On a single large file (~1GB), write speed was 17.9 MB/s and read speed was 34 MB/s. On a set of 813 files totalling 1.09 GB, the write speed was 13.1 MB/s and read speed was 57.9 MB/s. Unfortunately, I was not able to test transfers using the USB 3.0 capability of this drive.

Power consumption is quite good on this unit. I was pleased to see that when powered up but not plugged into a PC, the drive consumed less power than could be measured by my KillAWatt meter (less than 0.1 W). This keeps so-called “vampire power” consumption to a minimum, but I would still recommend flipping the power switch when the drive (and the connected PC) is not being used. While connected to a PC but sitting idle, the drive consumes 4.9 Watts of power, which rises to 6.8 Watts while under load. The latter number is a little lower than the Western Digital Elements drive, and the former is about the same.

In the documentation for the drive, buyers are able to download a “Protection Suite” for free from Iomega’s web site. This suite of products includes software for backups, PC cloning, Internet security from Trend Micro, and online backup via Mozy Home. Additional software offerings on the site included Roxio Retrospect Express and Express HD for backups and McAfee VirusScan Plus for anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, and web security. You will need the product serial number and access codes provided in the documentation to access and install these downloads. Unfortunately, Iomega is collecting your E-Mail address as part of granting this access, presumably to send you marketing messages later (there is a checkbox for opting out of such E-mails, so I’ll see if they honor that).

Unfortunately, most of the software is only qualified for use with 32 bit versions of Windows 7, according to Iomega’s web site. Since I have utilities that serve most of these purposes, and since I do not wish to fight battles with software that may or may not run properly on a 64-bit system, I did not try out any of this software.

Overall, this drive seems perfectly acceptable to use as an external hard drive. It’s of similar speed to other self-powered USB drives, and it has the potential to be better if the USB 3.0 connection yields better results. However, since the real-world performance showed to be nowhere near the maximum limit of USB 2.0, I wonder if the USB 3.0 connection would actually yield faster transfers.

While it’s slightly smaller physically than the Western Digital Elements drive, the plastic stand actually makes its footprint about the same. If I were to choose between the two, I would probably pick the WD drive, simply because it doesn’t need a stand to stay upright and it’s one less thing to lose. The Iomega drive gets some points for its appearance, so if you’re going to be taking this drive out in public, the brushed metal case looks better than the matte plastic of the Elements drive. I wouldn’t consider either drive something I’d want to lug in a briefcase, however. That’s what the smaller Passport-sized drives are for.

As a backup drive, the only thing that I would do if I were to purchase this drive is to purchase the 2 TB version instead of the 1 TB version. While it’s a good starting point, 1 TB just isn’t enough to store the large volumes of photos, music, and other data that people have on their hard drives. Ideally, a backup drive should be able to keep more than one backup set at a time, and that’s where a 2 TB drive really comes in handy. For the small increase in price, that’s an easy upgrade decision.

I’m looking forward to trying out the USB 3.0 connection, as…

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