Home > Consumer Reviews > Iomega Prestige 1.5 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive 34474

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

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.

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.

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.

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.