Iomega eGo Charcoal USB 3.0 500GB review
The eGo Charcoal is a fast, attractive, sturdy and affordable USB3 portable hard disk.
Apart from its understated grey appearance, Iomega’s latest eGo portable hard disk may not look very different from the company’s previous models, but it’s the company’s first portable USB3 disk. We were quite taken with the sleek and slender, yet sturdy metallic design.
The eGo isn’t all looks and no substance though. It excelled in our file transfer tests, writing large files at 75.2MB/s and reading them at just under 80MB/s. Small files performance was good too with write speeds of 35.1MB/s and read speeds of 60.2MB/s. These are the best speeds of any USB3 5,400rpm disk we’ve seen – only considerably more expensive external hard drives with a spindle speed of 7,200rpm are faster.
Included is the Retrospect Express HD backup program. Although the wizard-style interface is a bit fussy, it’s still useful to have 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.
Best of all, the eGo is good value at 14p per gigabyte and doesn’t cost any more than a USB2 portable disk. It’s a great buy.
