Customer Reviews

Iomega UltraMax 500 GB USB 2.0/FireWire 400 Desktop External Hard Drive 33904

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I received this hard drive about a week ago for Mac OS 10.5.2 Time Machine. The drive looks and works great. I own a Mac Pro so as you can see in the Amazon ad, this thing is like a "mini me" of the Mac Pro which I think is the coolest part of it. I have had no problems (yet) with this HD and I honestly do not see it happening.

Iomega has been around for so many years and I trust their products. There is indeed ONLY one drawback to this drive. When the drive is reading and writing, it could get a little loud. I don't think this would justify one less star because the hard drive itself works perfectly so far. The firewire 400 speed is just fine for Time Machine once per hour.

Apple's website has this drive for sale also and this drive has some great reviews there if you want to check out what some other people say about it. Bottom line, this drive rocks and I would recommend it to any Mac or even PC user out there. The look is just so nice.

The unit works fine. Watch out for cross-platform use. I wanted to backup a mac, a wn2K box, and Linux, as well as transfer files between the machines. Here some things I encountered--
1) Since it has firewire it comes formatted for the mac. So to use it with windows requires reformatting to fat. Be sure to follow the iomega instructions. Windows will partition the drive, but it won't format partitions over 4GB(!); therefore, the iomega format program needs to be used. Furthermore, the fat32 doesn't handle files over 32GB (so a mac system save is too big and fails).
2) I made three paritions on the drive, doing it on the mac, to get the mac filesystem. Then using linux I set & formatted the two remaining partitions to fat32 and ext3.
3) The windows backup software that comes with it did the system save OK, but making a recovery CD failed. I couldn't get past the software key code, probably maybe because the system was an upgrade.
4) Watch out--The base of the unit presses on and if you pick it up by the base it can separate. Crash! Fortunately, I was holding the power cord in one hand and that plus a thick carpet saved what would have likely wrecked the unit.

Overall, the drive works fine. Doing a full system backup on the mac couldn't be easier. Windows and linux proved somewhat of a challenge.

The price was the determining factor for my purchase. But this hard drive is not quiet and does not have an automatic turn on feature that I have had with other external hard drives. If it is plugged into my computer when I turn on my computer I still have to turn on the hard drive. If you plan on keeping the hard drive at a distance from your desktop then you should get a hard drive that automatically turns on and off with the computer. The firewire 400 does not have a noticable increase in speed compared to the USB and using the firewire 400 get my laptop temperature to increase, thus making my fans noisy. This is a good USB hard drive with lots of space. If you want to transfer large amount of data then I would get something with firewire 800 or something faster. This hard drive will do for the average person.

When I got a new macbook, I started my hunt for a decent sized and priced hard drive to use time machine on. They seemed to either be too expensive for what it was ($300 for 320 GB?!) or lower priced for a reason (die after a few months of use). Then came the Iomega Ultra Max HD. the 500 GB is more then enough for me (a film student) and the size of the drive is good sitting on my desk next to all my grammar books. It has been super reliable thus far and now that I'm upgrading my eMac, I'll probably get another one for it! I'm guessing if your one of those hard core millions of pictures and videos person, this might not be a great drive for you, but for a student looking to not lose a copy of that paper you spent ALL semester on?
PERFECT.

This drive is basically plug-and-play for Mac. I backed up nearly 5 years of data, including all the data from a 1 year old law practice. It took over a day for Time Machine to finish using Leopard on a G4 Powerbook, but the data files I dragged and dropped restored instantly (7200 rpm is faster than my internal hard drive). It's also very sturdy. About two hours after I set it up and started Time Machine, a girlfriend accidentally knocked it off my desk. I had visions of all sorts of problems, but it seemed fine and has been working fine since. So, I'm impressed.

The base is stable and, at least on mine, snug enough that it won't come off if I pick up the drive from the top, so it's easy to move around. It's also very quiet, so it doesn't irritate me when I'm working next to it.

The only issues that I have are that it is pretty big, I don't think it looks all that cool, and the light is shockingly bright. My home office is in a corner of my bedroom and it will keep me up at night if I don't shut it off. These are so minor to me that I still give it five stars. The price is good compared to comparable devices.

Two of my most prevalent complaints about external hard drives are that they make too much noise and tend to be slow. Not true of this one - it has been very reliable, fast and quiet. Even the previous model Iomega I bought last year is slower and makes a lot of fan noise. Big improvement.

I have purchased two of this drives for Mac OSX Leopard's Time Machine. Easy to set up, runs quietly, great value. I recommend it.

I have owned this for about 3 months, use it as a time machine backup drive on a Mac connected through firewire. Not as quite as some other reviewers claim. Worked right out of the box, no issues so far. Aesthetics a plus.

I connected it in less than 3 minutes and it's not noisy as I imagined! The only noise it makes comes from the external metal box tha vibrates due to the disk rotation speed. But if you touch it, it stops. Fit it correctly on the base and it won't vibrate.

Quiet and fast. I use it for my iTunes library and Time Machine backups. very nice unit.