770 of 785 people found the following review helpful:
Good value for the money
Amazon offers this unit for less than some big-box stores. Another good reason to buy from Amazon.
Always remember that outfits like iomega, LaCie, Fantom and others are packagers, not hard drive manufacturers. There are only a few hard drive manufacturers and all of them turn out good products. This does not mean that hard drives don't fail - they do and...
191 of 202 people found the following review helpful:
Beware of buying this!
I bought this external hard drive from IOmega through Amazon. I had it for less than a MONTH before it failed.
I contacted customer service. Told them what happened and they said it was the power supply that was the problem. (It clearly wasn't.) They said they would send another power supply.
Three weeks go by. Nothing.
I contact them again. No...
Amazon offers this unit for less than some big-box stores. Another good reason to buy from Amazon.
Always remember that outfits like iomega, LaCie, Fantom and others are packagers, not hard drive manufacturers. There are only a few hard drive manufacturers and all of them turn out good products. This does not mean that hard drives don't fail - they do and anyone who keeps only one copy of critical data is a fool.
The units I purchased both had current models of Seagate Barracuda drives installed: excellent devices. Right now, the drives themselves from some sources cost only a few dollars less than the iomega unit, so you are getting the external housing for just a few dollars.
The housing has a power switch, very nice at a time when other manufacturers are eliminating such "frills" and a white activity light on the side, which strikes me as a strange place for it. Since the housing has no fan, there is no fan noise. The noise from the drive itself should be imperceptible. (If it isn't, return the unit immediately.)The housing remains cool to the touch in use.
The unit size is nice and a plastic base is included for those who prefer a vertical mounting.
A power supply and USB cable round out the package.
One of the very nice aspects of this unit is that there is no software installed on the drive - nor is any included in the box. Yea! The drive comes NTFS formatted and, for use with an Apple Macintosh, must be reformatted.
Overall, a very nice value.
Jerry
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I stopped using Iomega products several years ago (remember the infamous "click of death" infesting Iomega Zip drives?) But after reading the Amazon reviews, I decided to get the Iomega 1TB drive.
It is about half the size of my old 350 GB Maxtor hard drives, costs half as much, and has three times the storage capacity! I plugged it in and Windows XP had it up and running in seconds, no fuss.
As a test, I transferred two gigs of photos (I'm a photojournalist) and it backed up two gigs in two minutes. It is almost perfectly silent.
I didn't bother downloading the free Retrospect Backup software; I always back up manually as part of my business routine.
If I ever have a problem with this drive, I'll update this review. Otherwise, I rate it as a perfect high-capacity drive, period.
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I've got 21 iomega drives - I've been using them for years and I've never had a problem - though a contract employee of mine said one of his died. (He actually just shipped it to me and yep - it's dead.) I just bought my first 1TB drive and I'm psyched. I'm using it to back up my old, lower-capacity drives. It seems as solid as the others. I'm going to fit all the video and projects on my first six drives onto one drive now! It's smaller than any of the others, too - as far as external physical dimensions. They got the dimensions wrong on this site - it's 8 x 4.5 x 1.25. It's awesome. I'm a pro video producer and now thanks to these drives (and a smokin' laptop) I'll be super-portable. I think I'll wind up with everything on 4 or 5 of these now. Killer product. I love these things.
***
NOTE - I now own 5 of the new prestige drives, and one of them has stopped working. Luckily I back everything up. I'm still buying the drives, and I'm hopeful that Iomega will replace it, but you should know I lost one of these newer ones.
***
NOTE - No, I didn't lose it after all. It was acting wonky for a while, but that was at least six or seven months ago, and I haven't had any trouble since. (It wasn't linking up to the computer, but that stopped after about a week.) It's been working fine since then.
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I've had the Prestige for a little over 2 weeks now. It works great.
-There's No annoying software (like my friend's WD Mybook)
-Runs super quiet
-I've had it on for hours at a time and it only gets a little warm
-It's got a cool stand
-It has a power switch
I've been very impressed thus far and would highly recommend this hard drive. Only downside is its actually about 465 gigs [Edit: This review is for the 500GB HD], but most hard drives are like that. The reason I say so far is externals seem to be prone to crashing if you read reviews. Hopefully it lasts forever though.
Again, Sweet hard drive.
Edit: I've had it for over a year now. I have left it on for days at a time. This thing is unstoppable.
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I bought this external hard drive from IOmega through Amazon. I had it for less than a MONTH before it failed.
I contacted customer service. Told them what happened and they said it was the power supply that was the problem. (It clearly wasn't.) They said they would send another power supply.
Three weeks go by. Nothing.
I contact them again. No explanation for what happened before. This time, they express the power supply.
... Which of course, makes absolutely NO difference.
Contact them *again*! This time, they acknowledge that maybe there is a problem with the hard drive. They'll replace it ... but I have to pay to send it back.
Sure. Why not charge the customer for a defective product from your company after ignoring a request for service for three weeks?
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It looks great, feels great and is quiet and so easy to install. Those are your pluses. But 3 weeks later, I get an error that says "Delayed Write Failed... the data has been lost." I chat with support and they tell me "Any hard drive that you have sooner or later will go bad. It is a mechanical thing that they will wear out. When that happens can't be known. What happens if you need to use the drive for backup, it is only a backup drive if the data that you have on the drive is also somewhere else. If it is only on this drive then it is a archive."
I was livid. I understand if after a 6 months, things start conking out and I should have made a triple backup, but 3 weeks? Plus I didn't even move the drive, it's been sitting pretty on my desk. My husband bought an iOmega a while ago and warned me that happened to him and I thought it was a fluke and he was probably unlucky. Including me, this makes 100% of the people I know who owned iomegas portable hdd dying on them.
While the argument of hard drives will conk out eventually is understandable, i do not see this happening for desktops or laptop hard drives (talk about mobiles) -- which then I can only conclude is they use inferior quality resources to manufacture.
bottomline - buy at your own risk and it's not a viable backup solution.
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My first external hard drive was a WD500, but two months after the warranty expired, so did the hard drive. It is now in my trash bin. I talked over the possible reasons for its early demise and it came down to the drive is always on, which could easily burn it out. The Iomega has an on/off switch, so I only have to turn it on when it is time to back up the computer. I think this may be a much better design and will give it a longer life.
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I just need a solid drive to backup my files, music and pictures. This one suits the bill just fine. I do not use any back-up software, so I cannot vouch for the one you can download from Iomega. I just drag the My Documents folder from my laptop over to the external hard drive icon and all my stuff gets copied. I bought this one on the strength of earlier reviews and have not been disappointed. Mine has been quiet and has not shown any heating problems. I may even buy another. (I did, a month later Second one is great,too)
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Received the Iomega drive opened box and set it up. The hard drive was not recognizeable by my notebook. I contacted Iomega support via online chat which is their only free support option and I spent 30 min. troubleshooting the situation. Support Tech determined it was an Iomega product problem. Had to box up the harddrive and mail it ($6.00 shipping) to Iomega support. Several days later they sent me a replacement refurb unit. Seems to be working fine now. Hoping it lasts for the long term.
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I bought this hard drive in November 2008 but didn't actually take it out of the box until late December. Less than a week after unboxing it, I turned it on only to have it start spinning uselessly. My computer wouldn't recognize it as anything but a malfunctioning USB device and following the troubleshooting steps on the Iomega website got me nowhere. Support is annoying at best; I dislike using online chats for support (the only free option) and phone calls run $25 per incident. Email isn't available at all. It's ridiculous. It's particularly frustrating as the data on the hard drive is now lost to me, some of which can't be replaced, even if the hard drive is.
This is my first experience with an external hard drive. I only wish it had been a better one. As it stands now, I can't recommend this drive to anyone, especially as other reviews indicate that I'm not the only one with this problem. Look elsewhere for reliability.
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