Customer Reviews

Iomega Desktop Hard Drive 500 GB Hi-Speed USB 2.0 External Hard Drive - 33654

5 star:		(181)
4 star:		(76)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(39)

 

 

This is a GREAT external hard drive. It's fast (7200 RPM), can stream a movie straight off it and simultaneously backup a movie with very few lag spikes. It's quiet, only hear it every once in a while when it's doing some heavy duty writing/reading. It's Reliable, haven't had a single problem with it yet.

Best of all, the price is right. I wholeheartedly recommend this external drive to everyone.

Just plug the usb cable and plug in the ac/adapter and you're ready to roll. In fact, I'm going to go get another one myself.

I bought this because it said it worked with OSX. I know USB is supposed to be a universal thing, but of course all us Mac junkies have had our issues here and there - even with hardware that's SUPPOSED to work. Well, no such problems here. I plugged it in, booted my computer, and the mount point appeared within 30 seconds in the Finder. The aesthetics of the product are nice - it's small, and you can stand it up so it doesn't take up much space. It's very very quiet, only a bit of 'chik chik chik' if you're moving gigabytes back and forth. And the price is oh-so-right for this much space. So if you're a Mac user and looking for some add-on storage, this is the one for you.

I didn't buy this hard drive on amazon, but thought i'd write the review.
Set up is really easy, just plug the usb and the ac adapter and you are ready to go.
It has a great design, a stainless steel look and a blue light in the middle that looks kind of cool.
You can put it standing up or flat.
Doesn't take much space.
File transfer is fast. I'm not really an expert and I don't count the nanoseconds or anything, but it works for me.
No problem playing video or audio from the unit.
I have noticed that when I leave it on for long periods of time, it does get a little hot, but since I only use to back up files from time to time it's not really a problem.
All in all, I'd say this is a good product.

The drive looks well-built and sturdy with a brushed aluminum case. The backside, however - where all the cables are plugged in - seems to be made from extremely thin plastic which immediately gives when only touched slightly.

It is true plug-and-play, the drive was immediately and quickly recognized, no problems there. I reformatted from FAT32 to NTFS which took a while but nothing out of the ordinary given that it had to format almost 500 GB.

From what I can tell, the drive is very fast which makes it a pleasure to use when having to work with huge files.

The bad part: This drive is noisy. It is by far the noisiest of my external hard drives which are all Western Digital (60 GB & 80 GB Passport drives, 250 GB My Book). No fun sitting at my desk and listening to this "morse code noise" for hours. I have used my Western Digital drives, even the small portable Passport drives, for months as my regular drives (not just for occasional jobs!) and all are performing extremely quietly - not this Iomega drive. I read where other reviewers said it ran quietly but not the one I got. This one is LOUD and is already getting on my nerves to the point where I have decided to make it the backup drive and not expose myself to these sounds every day.

Another thing: It gets very hot. I have it sitting in the stand on my desk with plenty of airflow around it but it is almost too hot to touch. Again nothing that I have ever experienced with my WD drives which get warm but not hot.

All in all, I am not very impressed and will probably stick with WD drives in the future.

I've been using this hard drive for over a month and I've done my best to really put it to the test. As of today, all I can say is that it works as advertised and that the price paid is way below what I would've expected. Here's my 2 cents:

DESIGN
The overall design is pretty slick and the brushed aluminum gives it a very futuristic look. It's very slim and will fit almost anywhere. You can use it vertically (stand included) but I'd rather use it horizontally.

HEAT
The hard drive WILL heat up around 40 minutes of use, at least in my case. The aluminum case will not help at all in dispersing the heat, on the contrary, it will sting a bit if you try to lift it while hot. I find that it gets less hot if used vertically.

NOISE
As for the noise factor, other reviews have deemed the hard drive to be noisy and that it makes clunking noises. It will make some noise, obviously, while working but I find it to be noisier if vertical. So there's a trade-off between noise and heat based on what I just wrote in the heat factor.

PERFORMANCE
The hard drive is a total workhorse and I love to beat the hell out of it. I've had files going to and from the hard drive while watching a 600+MB .avi movie and while burning a DVD with files from the hard drive. The movie plays without a hiccup and in my case it makes me wonder how much abuse this baby can take! I'm simply excited to have this toy in my arsenal and I fully recommend it to everyone out there.

MAC EXPERIENCE
I bought the hard drive to use it with Time Machine and I'm happy to say that I made the right move. TMachine will only use a sector of the HD and will let you upload and download files without any hassle to the rest of the HD... BUT once it has been formatted to be used with a Mac, you won't be able to use it with Windows. Oh, XP will detect it all right but that's as far as you'll get. Luckily I'm less PC-dependent as days go by and don't rely on the HD to move around files from PC to PC or from PC to Macs for that matter.

This is the best deal out there right now for a 500g external HD. It's very quick, easy to use and to integrate with Windows. I did quite a bit of research before purchasing it and it's the least expensive out there with all these variables (currently). If your looking for a solid external to manage media files; you will not be disappointed with the Iomega.

(Note: I am a PC user running Windows XP, so I can't say how this device works on a Mac.)

Wow. I still remember a little over a decade ago my dad purchasing a 500MB additional internal hard drive for our desktop. I would never have imagined that I would have the option to purchase, for a measly $120, a hard drive 1,000 times larger! (And ordering over the internet would also have been a foreign concept...)

Iomega has been in business for years. Remember the zip drive? This particular product, at Amazon's heavily discounted price, is an amazing deal. Certain reviewers complained that the product comes with 465GB instead of 500GB, but the reality is that ALL hard drives will show up as having less memory space than advertised because of formatting and primarily because of a difference in terminology: the Iomega indeed comes with approximately 500,000,000,000 bytes of memory, but then the computer considers a Gigabyte to be 1,024,000,000 bytes instead of 1,000,000,000. Same goes for how it calculates megabytes and kilobytes...a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes.

So far, I have used the drive to take my video files off my laptop and to back up files, but I even installed Quake III on it to use it for testing...and was able to play without any extra lag time. Make sure you have a USB 2.0 port, however (all computers that are of fairly recent vintage should have them).

We will see how it fares long term, but as of now, I wholeheartedly recommend this little marvel. I still can't quite fathom how big 500GB is, and the price is awesome.

I got this for my wife, since we have a new child and she is now all about editing video of the child to send to our parents. Video EATS storage space voraciously, and her once reasonably sized 150Gb HD suddenly became a bottleneck when it came to editing video.

So I popped onto Amazon and ordered this 500gb HD and solved that problem quickly, easily and inexpensively.

The only downside I can think of is that the manufacturers ALL abuse the GB symbol as meaning thousands/millions rather than actual 1024 byte sizes. So it isn't 500GB but closer to 460GB. But they ALL do this, so it isn't like if you ordered a 500Gb from someone else that it would have more room.

The drive is reasonably attractive and looks fine on the desk beside her monitor and it seems to function well and is fast enough for video work. No real complaints.

I had this drive approximately two months when the usb port on the case came loose. I unscrewed the two case screws and removed the cover. The usb button is supposed to be soldered onto the circuit board but it must have just been placed on there waiting to be knocked off. It was not soldered on, period. If this happens to you just unscrew the 5 screws holding the drive to the case and unplug the drive. You can then add the drive to your computers ribbon cable and set it up as a internal secondary drive. The funny part is I did this and contacted Iomega and told them I needed a new case. They then told me that I violated the warranty, by opening the case, and would not receive a new case, because they are not set up to send just a case. Apparently their idea of customer support is to have you load 500gb worth of stuff on your drive, have the case fail, and have to send the case and your stuff to them for data recovery costs, etc. Not happening; and you would think with all the problems this company has had in the past that they would not be trying to pull stuff like this.

Iomega Desktop Hard Drive 500GB Hi-speed USB 2.0 - bought this as a back up drive and repository for ripped music and it has worked fine with no issues (connected to an XP desktop). I had read the reviews about the reality of the "500" GB size so I knew what I was getting as far as $/GB.

The included 1.1/2.0 USB cable is just over 2 foot long which was too short for my needs (from the USB port on my desktop located on the floor to a cool safe spot on my desk away from kids etc.) So depending on your application you may want to get a longer cable or an extension USB hub/cable.