When I started running out of space on my external hard drive that I used for backups, I started looking for a massive 1TB drive to replace it. The cheapest I could find was this 1TB Iomega Select hard drive, which set me back around £50.
Included with the drive is everything you need to get it setup: a USB cable, 3-pin power adapter, the hard drive itself and all the manuals. Installation was pretty easy and only involved simply plugging the hard drive into the PC via the supplied cable and waiting for it to be detected by the operating system. The drive comes preformatted in NTFS, which gives about 931GB of usable space; although the drive is compatible with Mac OSX too, it will require formatting prior to use.
When turned on, the drive isn’t very noisy however it does get worryingly hot after a long period of time. After using it for a couple of hours it was hot to the touch (much more so than similar external drives) and I wanted to turn it off out of fear of destroying the longevity of the device. Unfortunately, as the unit doesn’t have an on/off switch, this involves unplugging the power cable from the back of the enclosure. When powered on and in use, the bright blue LED at the back of the device will flash to indicate activity. It can be quite distracting though as in my room it had no trouble illuminating the entire area underneath my desk.
According to HD Tune, the drive achieves approximately 36 MB/s transfer speed and an average access time of 17.5ms. Although this is poor when compared to internal hard drives and some of the higher-end external drives, it’s reasonable for a drive of this price and it won’t be much of an issue if all you’re using it for is to store pictures or videos. I wouldn’t want to be running any programs from this drive though.
My main problem with this device – and perhaps the only one which would make me reconsider purchasing – is that there appears to be absolutely no power management at all. No matter how long it has been since it's been used, the drive doesn’t spin down at all. Even when the computer is turned off, it will happily keep on spinning until you unplug it from the wall. Considering that this is a feature that is pretty much expected from any external hard drive now, I am quite disappointed that the Iomega drive doesn’t have it. This almost certainly makes it ineligible as a permanent external storage device for my computer as far as I am concerned.
Although it has its flaws, I do have to take the price of this device into consideration. I am therefore willing to award this hard drive 3/5.