Iomega eGo USB 3.0 Review

We review Iomega's eGo portable hard drive with USB 3.0 which boosts transfer speeds up to 10x faster than USB 2.0.

Introduction

USB 3.0 has arrived, and with it, a whole new batch of drives designed to let you push around those Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoints, and Blu-ray rips of Pulp Fiction, even faster. While most USB 3.0 drives still command a premium, Iomega will be one of the first to drop the USB 2.0 entirely and fold USB 3.0 into all of its drives – without increasing prices – later this fall. We put the new eGo through its paces to see whether the upgrade is worth the wait.

Features and Design

Iomega hasn’t bothered to give the eGo a facelift to reflect its newfound speed, but that’s quite alright with us. The eGo USB 3.0 remains one of the slimmer drives on the market at just 0.625 inches thick, and its similar shape will allow you to use it with old eGo accessories, like the carrying case. At the moment, opting for USB 3.0 will limit you to only charcoal color, but that will change in October when USB 3.0 begins migrating over to even more drives and the prices drop to current USB 2.0 levels. For the record, charcoal has a clean, professional air, and if the drive enclosures weren’t plastic, the slippery glossy layered on top could almost pass for automotive-grade clear coat.

The only real clue you’re dealing with a new drive: Where a standard mini-USB jack used to lie, you’ll now find a USB 3.0 SuperSpeed connector, a new configuration that looks a bit like a long, sideways letter B. The extra pins here translate to better performance, but conveniently, that B shape also breaks it into connector into two ports, one of which you can use with old-style microUSB cables. Obviously, you won’t reap the benefits of full USB 3.0 speed, you’ll be thankful for it when you need to pull files off in a jam.

Testing and Performance

Unless you just cracked your computer out of its foam packing a few months ago – or built it yourself with one of the few USB 3.0-capable motherboards out there – chances are, you don’t have USB 3.0 onboard. We tested with a LaCie USB 3.0 PCI Express card, but just about any USB 3.0 adapter should provide similar performance. At the moment, they all use the same NEC chips.

To provide a performance baseline, we ran the eGo through the wringer at USB 2.0 speeds. It turned in write speeds of 23.67 MB/s and read speeds of 25.86 MB/s – a marked improvement over the last USB 2.0 eGo we reviewed, but still not as fast as one of our favorite USB 2.0 drives, LaCie’s tiny Rikiki, which hit speeds of 30.45 MB/s and 29.18 MB/s, respectively.

Switch over to USB 3.0, and things heat up. While claims of performance “10 times faster than USB 2.0” are sheer marketing hype, we found that you can expect an honest doubling of speed in real-life performance. We hit average write speeds of 49.35 MB/s and read speeds of 50.0 MB/s. At that speed, an entire 4.19GB DVD rip of The Empire Strikes Back transferred to the drive in just one minute, 24.9 seconds. You could hypothetically fill the drive to its entire 500GB capacity in two hours, 49 minutes.

While USB 3.0 performance is certainly impressive, it’s worth noting that Iomega’s FireWire 800 eGo still has it beat. That model hit 57.39 MB/s write speeds and 53.93 MB/s read speeds in the same transfer tests, just barely edging out the USB 3.0 model for speed supremacy.

Conclusion

Iomega’s eGo USB 3.0 portable drive maintains the same winning look and feel as previous iterations while essentially doubling transfer speeds. The 500GB version of the drive still commands a $20 price premium over the (list price) USB 2.0 version, but the USB 3.0 version will be a no brainer when Iomega switches the rest of the eGo line to USB 3.0, without increasing price, in October.

Highs:

Vastly improved transfer speeds
Sleek, portable design
Affordable (more so after October price drop)
Backward compatible with microUSB cables

Lows:

Not the speediest competitor in USB 2.0 mode

Email On Deck: A disposable email address that works

Today, Team Inforpioneer brings an interesting Email service for our reader which will definitely help our readers to improve their internet security and will benefit in some other ways. Here is a short description of this service. EmailOnDeck.com is the premier site for all things relating to temporary, disposable and throwaway email addresses. We want to help you avoid SPAM, protect your online privacy, and stop you from having to give away your personal email address to every company and person on the internet who insists on you giving it to them. We work hard and will continue to work hard to give you a disposable email address that works with any site or app. We hope to help give you back the control of deciding who you want to give your personal info to. Temporary emails are perfect for any transaction where you want to improve your online privacy. Use them when you buy or sell Bitcoins or trade cryptocurrency, at exchanges, or locally. They can be used for QA tes...

A Brief History of 9 Popular Blogging Platforms

E ven though Microsoft’s spell check insists that “blog” and “blogger” are not real words, they’ve been been in the dictionary since 2003 . Blogs and their platforms have a lengthy history. The beginnings of blogging was a time not unlike today: Plaid was in style, a beloved rock star had passed, and the Internet was just gaining momentum on college campuses. In 1994, then Swarthmore College student Justin Hall started an online diary called Justin’s Links from the Underground . The site, which first started as a guide to the web, soon became an account of Hall’s life, and earned him the surely coveted title of pioneer blogger. Three years later, Jorn Barger would coin the term “weblog,” and it’s short form, “blog,” was later coined by Peter Merholz. Today, the web is comprised of millions of blogs covering every topic imaginable. Here is short history of some of the medium’s most popular platforms. 1. Open Diary Founded in 1998 by Bruce Ableson, Open Diary was the first website that ...

SEO Optimizing A Website For Improved Value

SEO or search engine optimization is something that every web owner and creator should be aware of. Even if a website owner hires an expert to carry out the online marketing, understanding the very basics and how it really can improve a websites performance and popularity is important. Simply put, optimizing a website is important and is built around keywords that are valuable to a website and to the products or services it is trying to provide. By focusing on main keywords or key phrases for a business, and expanding on them over time, can improve the amount of visitors a website receives, in turn increasing profits or simply improving its popularity if it is an information website. SEO is valuable, and means a way of making a site appear at a higher ranking in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, AOL etc. Using this important type of online marketing can reap great benefits. It takes time to learn and time to complete, and is a constant job to keep a website performing well above co...

Info Pioneer

Search This Blog