Amacom IOdisk Portable Hard drive 80GB
Amacom IOdisk Portable Hard drive 80GB
Site: Amacom
Date: Feb 2005
Price: £148 Inc VAT at time of writing
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Use: Backup or store your data on this slim portable drive.
More people are using more disk space with the growing number of digital pictures, and mp3 collections what would happen if the unthinkable happened. Your hard drive crashed. Well you would restore a backup right?
Even with today's stable products and growing storage capacities the hard drive of a machine can still fail although. When it does the usual situation is for a new drive to be installed and the result is you would need to start from scratch.
There are many backup options now available CD/DVD Writers are popular, and many people install an additional hard drive to copy files to. Whilst others use smaller flash devices to backup important files such as email.
Ideally you want a hard drive which is removable, step in the IOdisk with a portable 80GB drive with the speed of USB 2.0.
Specifications:
Data Transfer Rate (Max) |
|
USB 2.0 Interface |
40 Mb/sec or higher |
USB 1.1 Interface |
1.5 Mb/sec |
Supported Interfaces |
USB 2.0 ( EHCI Compatible Port ) |
USB 1.1 (OHCI or UHCI Compatible Port ) |
|
Supported Operating Systems |
Windows 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 & XP and Mac OS 9.1 & above |
Data Capacity |
20GB IOD20000U |
Shock and Acoustics |
|
Operating |
200G |
Non-operating |
800G |
Acoustic Noise |
<= 21dB (idle mode) |
Seek Time |
|
Track to Track |
2 Msec |
Average |
12 Msec |
Maximum |
22Msec |
Average Latency |
6 Msec |
Buffer Size |
2048KB |
Power Requirements |
Supplied via USB interface - directly from computer or via supplied power cable from computers PS/2 or spare USB port |
Dimensions (mm) |
120x75x15 (LxWxH) |
Weight |
185 grams |
Warranty |
1 Year |
What you get:
- IOdisk unit
- USB 2.0 Cable
- Driver CD
The Unit:
Well the review unit we looked at was the 80GB version. Other versions of 20,40,60, and 100GB are also available. All come complete with a leather wallet which offers the unit some protection when in a pocket or case.
The body of the unit is made from aluminium which helps keep the unit lightweight and of course adds to making the unit look clean, smart and stylish.
The concept is straight forward a storage device with a far greater capacity than memory sticks. Advantages are you can drag and drop files quickly and easily via any USB enabled PC with a compatible Windows, Mac, or Linux Operating system. The benefit of it being a hard disk with plenty of capacity also allows you to backup your whole system, as if needed you can also use the IOdisk to boot your computer.
The hard disk inside the unit was a Maxtor. The drive was silent for most of the time whilst in use with the occasional click noise but you could say this was whisper quiet.
Installing the drive:
As with most USB products installing is simple simply connect and wait for the Removable drive icon to appear in the system tray. You can then view the drive and drag and drop files easily.
Testing:
To test the drive I connected it directly via my PC and via a hub with USB 2.0 support. It is worth mentioning that the drive arrived formatted in FAT32 format which is used with Windows9x for Windows 2000/XP etc the standard file system NTFS is for commonly used so the first thing was to quick format the drive.
For those of you who like to look at benchmarks you will not be disappointed below are some results from SiSandra and HDTach.
Benchmarks:
I am used to using the various USB flash drives on offer and this using a hard disk was much quicker and a 4GB folder of various file types took around 6 minutes. The benefits of copying data to another hard disk are simple large files can be easily accessed without the necessity of a cd or DVD drive. The disk can be re-written thousands of times compared to the write once or rewritable media on offer.
Of course this being portable and not requiring additional power cables does allow for this to be run from any laptop or PC for fast retrieval or storage of data.
Comments:
There are many external drives on the market, almost all are 3.5" drives compared to the 2.5" drive used in the IOdisk. Although the larger drives have faster access speeds the benefits of a more compact and smaller unit which does not require an additional power cable whilst still providing a fast useable rate of transfer makes this a desirable product for the individual or for the IT or Manager of any business.
Price wise you are paying for the benefits mentioned above, but still £150 is an affordable price. 3.5" versions will cost less as they are more common but they lack complete portability and are obviously more bulky. This device is ideal for business use to ensure a backup is always available offsite in case of events or for insurance cover. For the individual a practical option to easily backup or transfer files including MP3 collections or digital photo albums accumulated over the years.
