Iomega eGo Portable 500GB review

The eGo’s design is one we love – the slim, tapered and colourful design feels robust. Although it’s not advertised as being shock-resistant, it has survived our cack-handed stumbles unscathed. Our sample had an attractive red case, but other colours are available.

Included with this external hard drive is EMC’s Retrospect Express HD backup software. It’s a useful program if you don’t already have and use a backup application. It can backup your files automatically on a schedule to suit you and will only back up those files which have changed, saving time and disk space.

It can also keep older versions of your files in case you need to refer back to them. Like most backup software, files aren’t accessible through Windows Explorer – you need to use the software to restore or retrieve files.

The eGo coped very well with our large files tests managing 29MB/s overall. It was also quick at writing small files – its speed of 24.4MB/s almost matches desktop USB2 disks. It wasn’t as quick at reading small files as we had expected, though. 14.5MB/s is one of the slowest results we’ve seen for a USB2 portable disk, but it’s not too far behind the front runners.

There’s a lot to like about the Iomega eGo Portable. It looks great, feels very well made, comes with some useful backup software and, best of all, it’s cheap at 14p per gigabyte. Its performance isn’t quite as consistently fast as we’d like, and unless you want backup software with file version capabilities, Hitachi’s Rugged Portable Drive is a better choice for the same price.