Thread: Iomega prestige portable 250 GB

Hard Drive capacities continue to rise. The requirements of most people is still limited to moving data that wouldn't fit into fiash drives. Now, customers want more than just capacity. Design and quality of the drive comes into the picture. The Iomega Prestige Portable 250 GB is a drive that seems 10 fit this gap.

The Iomega Prestige series drives come in brushed metal cases. It makes the drive really sturdy, but it isn't very heavy either at 190 grams. Although this is one of the premium drives from Iomega, there is no Firewire or any other faster connectivity options available.

Synthetic tests show that the Iomega drive is very capable of performing. We used SiSoft Sandra and all the read speeds hovered around the 30 MBps mark which is pretty good for a portable drive. HD Tach too supported the same scores. The speeds are right on the edge of the peak performance of USB 2.0. CPU utilization numbers are pretty high at around 9 to 10 per cent through the tests.

In the real-world tests, the drive can write 4 GB sequential file rounds at around 24 MBps. Write speeds are around 20 per cent slower than read. Internal file copy commands take almost double the time which is expected from portable hard drives. Speeds while copying data from the portable drive to the internal one went up to 31.5 MBps which is really good as well.

When performance figures are compared, then the Iomega Prestige drive is at par with the faster drives from the hard drive test in April. The price of RS 3,800 is pretty good as you aren't paying a lot more.