Review There's no doubt but that the Iomega Prestige is a looker. And with 1TB of hard disk storage on board, it's at the current peak of portable hard drive capacity.

The styling, as you can see from the pictures, is all gunmetal-coloured brushed steel, with a Mac Pro speaker-grille pattern of small holes punched into the front panel, and Iomega's logo stamped on the top.

Iomega's Prestige Portable: hard'n'heavy

The front and back - a mini USB port and activity light are the only features here - are plastic, but with a thick terabyte 2.5in drive on board and the metal wrapped around it, the Prestige has a solid feel, weighty but not heavy.

This is really a desktop drive that's small for convenience and portability rather than a drive you'll want to carry around with you. If that's what you need, there are smaller, lighter products out there, though not one that can provide the same storage capacity as the Iomega, at least not yet.

Iomega provides a bundle of apps, but makes the software available as a download rather than on a disc or loaded on the Prestige itself. Key in the drive's serial number and the utilities are yours: ignoring the Trend Micro anti-malware 12-month demo and the MozyHome online backup 2GB freebie - we'd recommend Dropbox instead - there are three backup apps for Windows users and a fourth for Mac fans.

Apple owners get EMC Retrospect Express, as do the other folk, who also get Retrospect Express HD and Iomega QuikProtect. I couldn't try the latter - it only runs on 32-bit operating systems, but Express HD is a competent if old-looking back-up tool. The non-HD version of Express gives you more control over the back-up process, if you need it. They're all free, so there's no barrier to trying them one after the other and seeing which you prefer.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 Results
Sequential and 512KB Random

Speeds in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Higher points are better

4KB Random

Speeds in Megabytes per Second (MB/s)
Higher points are better

Iomega bundles a cable with the drive itself, and it's a double-headed cord should you need the extra power a second USB port can provide.

As usual, I tested the drive using CrystalDiskMark 3 with a 1GB file size. I reformatted the Prestige to the FAT 32 file system - it ships as an NTFS device. The Iomega performed reasonably well when compared to a selection of 500GB portable drives, though its random write characteristics fell behind most of the others.

The Prestige is priced at around £130 - which is par for the course when it comes to 1TB 2.5in external hard drives.

Verdict

With a peer-matching performance, and a similarly average price and software package, Iomega's Prestige Portable can really only be judged on its looks. And it's a good-looking hard drive - but more a discreet desktop unit than a go-anywhere compact file store. ®