Customer Reviews

Iomega 33720 FireWire 800/FireWire 400/USB 2.0 1TB 2HD x 500GB UltraMax Hard Drive

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

I received the drive today (free 2-day Amazon Prime shipping rocks!). After an unintuitive setup and poor user manual instructions, I searched the Iomega website's support pages for help and used their free 1-to-1 chat option (free while your product is in warranty) to get everything figured out. Here's what I learned ... (NOTE: I am using a Mac. I have no idea what the PC setup is like. It's also important to note that these procedures are only good for THIS UltraMax disk because it can do RAID 1 and has 2, 500GB drives. If you buy a different kind of Iomega UltraMax, you'll have to do your own setup legwork or risk ruining your drive.)

The drive comes formatted as HFS+ for Mac set to RAID 0. I wanted mine set for RAID 1 to have a redundant backup of all of my important files and a cloned disk image of my boot drive. The procedure to use RAID 1, regardless of what you may read in your user manual, is to let the disk mount as it is out of the box -- just unpack it and plug it into your Mac. You'll see it mount on your desktop. Then eject the disk, wait for the disk to spin down (listen closely), and hold the power button on the drive in for 2 seconds until the light goes off.

With the drive off, push both pin switches on the back of the drive to the down position for RAID 1, then hold the power button on the drive in again for 2 seconds to power back on. You will get red lights on the front of the drive indicating a drive failure.

Find a paper clip or a pen and hold in the "rebuild" button on the front for 10 seconds. You'll see a series of lights turn colors. Eventually you'll get rid of the red failure lights.

As the drive remounts, you may get a message that the drive's format is not recognizable. Hit "ignore" and open DiskUtiliy. (If the drive mounts without the message, just open DiskUtility.)

In DiskUtility, select the appropriate Iomega UltraMax disk icon on the left and then click the "erase" menu at the top of the window. Select your volume format (e.g., Mac OS Extended (Journaled)), give your new disk a name, decide whether or not you'll ever need to access this disk from a computer using OS9 (then check or uncheck that box), and then click "erase."

Within seconds, you'll have a newly named drive appear on your desktop. Because it's now in RAID 1 format (the pin switches you pushed down earlier do the trick; you do NOT have to do anything for RAID in DiskUtility), the drive's size will have decreased from 1TB down to 500GB (using the other 500GB for a second, mirror image of the first).

(NOTE: Many people have posted on the Amazon site how jipped and betrayed they feel because the Iomega drives they're getting aren't really 20GB, or 500GB, or 1TB, or whatever. You will notice that this 1TB drive shows up initially as less than 1TB. And the RAID 1 configuration will show up as a little less than 500GB. This is NORMAL -- for all makes and models. I haven't seen a hard drive yet that didn't use a little of its own space for stuff it needs to run.)

You may notice some repetitive clicks every few seconds, even if you aren't using the drive or don't have anything copied to it. This is normal. The drive is either being accessed without you realizing it or it's simply doing a check to make sure the first and second drives match each other exactly (you'll see that both disk lights light up when you hear this clicking).

Once I got that all straightened out, I've been hitting it hard with backups all day. Backups with FireWire 800 have been really fast and reliable. I've moved over 100GB today without any problems. It's been on all day and is as cool as a cucumber. So far so good ... And you can't beat the price on Amazon, especially if you're setup for free shipping.

Rating this at 4 stars simply because the set up is really unclear, even for someone who knows a thing or two about drives, formatting, RAID, etc. I'll post back in a few weeks, months to let you know how it's performing.

After issues with other manufacturers 1TB drives, I was eager to get something that would last more than 2 years and work instantly out of the box with my Macs. So far this drive has been flawless. It is fast, quiet, looks great, comes pre-formatted for Macs, and has a triple interface (2 FireWire 800 ports, 1, FireWire 400 port, 3 USB 2.0 ports) so it's easy to daisy chain multiple drives if you need 8TB of space like me. The drive enclosure is also well-ventilated and has a quiet fan. Heat is death to hard drives, so this is one of the best features compared to the other enclosed drives that are fanless...

I edit videos on a Mac, which is how it arrived pre-formatted, and it has performed excellently. The case it rock solid, since I transport it from time to time for work at other locations. It's design will allow me to stack them when I need more storage. Only concern is that it uses RAID 0 to achive the 1TB size, I lose one drive and it is back to square one. That is why I will be purchasing a second drive for backup.

This drive is a good complement to my G5 Power Mac computer. In the few months that I've had it, it has been a solid performer. You have your choice of FireWire or USB interfaces. And the case is designed to go well with the aluminum "cheese grator" cases of the Power Mac (G5) and Mac Pro (Xeon) Apple towers. It doesn't go quite as far in the looks as one of the other competitors, but it is close enough. For those with a computer that doesn't have an aluminum finished case, the drive may look out of place, but most people do not buy a hard drive for its appearance. After my issues with another vendor's 1 TB drive, I was pleased when this drive just worked as expected.

Drive is fine except that:

1. Not compatible with apple airport extreme basestation due to block size issue.

2. More importantly - very noisy fan (probably damaged) sounds so bad I can't be in the same room.

And there's no obvious way to get support from IOMega without paying $25/call.

Purchased July 19, 2008. Failed Oct. 9, 2009. Normal operation (Time Machine). I suspect the disks are fine, but drive fails to mount either with USB or FireWire.

I have two of these, purchased a little over a year ago. Both of them just died. It seems to be the power supplies, but they each behave somewhat differently. In any case, I'm buying a SATA to USB dock to see if I can get the data off. I'm not likely to buy anything like these again.

Update: 3 of the 4 internal drives (there are two 500GB drives in each unit) were bad.

I just took the hard disks from within the enclosure and put them into a Drobo and 3 out of the 4 drives are working just fine. It looks as if the circuit boards that held them together fried but the actual drives (but for one) are fine. As to Drobo, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread! Specially the last one with Firewire 800 to the Mac and really silent.

Steer away from this unreliable hard drive. Mine lasted about 8 months and was replaced under warranty with a reconditioned drive. That one lasted about 3 month. I was difficult navigating the website and finding an email address to correspond with. When there was a response, I was told too bad, sorry. Never again will I deal with Iomega.

I have two of these, one on my MB Pro, and one on my XP Machine. The firewire 800 is good enough to render video to without problems. They have been running for several months and have had no problems. I have shared folders on them to my network, and have had no problem watching movies off of them over the network. They have single drive versions of this now, and maybe that is why the price has come down almost a hundred bucks. FYI, the drive comes formated for MACs. It gives you instructions on how to format it for Windows.

Edit 08 June 09 ** I wish I knew how to downgrade to two stars.
I purchased two of them. After about 6 months one of them started having problems starting up. It would make a clicking sound for a progressively longer time before finally spooling up. This last time I tried several things, but could not get it to spool up (even after 24 hours). After reading a review that mentioned the power supplies, I tried swapping them. Now they both are working. I can also attest to the very poor customer support of Iomega. I never used them because of the $25.00 fee to even talk to them. I just ordered a HP EX485 MediaSmart Home Server with a bunch of 1T drives. As soon as it comes in, I am swapping them out. If I can purchase the power supplies separately, I might keep the Iomegas for portable file transfer, but I will never use them for critical data again. I used them for video editing on my MAC, and the Firewire 800 came in handy. I just cannot afford to risk loosing months of work.