- Wednesday, 25 November 2009
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The Ego has landed
IOMEGA STEPS UP TO the Terabyte league today by unveiling their very first 1TB eGo external hard drive
Coming on from the dead-bovine-clad announcement last week, Iomega rocks up with a design based on their popular Ego portable hard drives only with a whole new size. Already currently available in many different and bizarre flavours, from: 160, 250, 320GB capacities and even camouflaged. This new 'Super Ego' arrives with the more sensible regular Iomega colours of ruby red, midnight blue, and jet black.
This desktop model houses a 1TB, 3.5-inch HDD with USB 2.0 connectivity holding up to 4,000,000 photos, over 18,500 hours of music or 1,500 hours of video – according to the press blurb.
"By applying the award-winning style of the Ego design to a desktop hard drive, Iomega is giving users a one-terabyte Super Ego that’s all about form and function, a beautiful and pleasing design for even the most data-intensive applications," the marketing spiel chuffs. "Today’s computer users want more style, capacity, and data security out of their computer hardware; the colorful, dependable and colossal one terabyte Ego Desktop Hard Drive delivers on all counts." said Peter Wharton, vice president marketing, Iomega Corporation.
As with their other drives it pitches up with a license for PC-Only EMC Retrospect HD software, for automatic, scheduled or on-demand backups.
This Ego is compatible with Mac OS X 10.1 or higher and with Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP and Windows Vista.
The Iomega Ego desktop hard drive, USB 2.0, 1TB is now available in the UK for £149.99, VAT included, from online retailers, VARs, resellers and select retailers, as well as at www.iomega.com.
Seeing as there’s nothing ever wrong with a big Ego, we welcome this latest edition µ
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I own IOmega 1TB drive for about 1/2 a year.

Anyway the device is crap , firmware is extreamly flawed and no firmware updates.
As a final insult look at this chat with their support I had:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Starts here <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Thank you for contacting Iomega Technical Support, my name is Mario. How may I help you? [12:19:39 PM]

Roman: Hi , I have rather strange problem Smile
I have StoreCenter 1T (2x500) drive
The problem is that at somepoint I urgently needed storage space so I removed both 500GB disks from SoreCenter , reformated them and used for a week or so
Now when I put them back into StoreCenter it detected on network but there is now web interface and such
I guess (now Sad) that HDDs contained firmware and I removed it by formating in Windows
So the problem is that I need somehow to "upload" firmware back to the NAS ?
can you help me with this ? [12:19:44 PM]


Mario: Unfortunately because this device is not intended to be user serviceable, we do not have the firmware available as a download, nor do we have the proper steps on how to upload the firmware onto the ROM [12:20:13 PM]

Roman: Really ? but thats a NAS device with a RAID ? what you usualy do if one of the drives fails ? [12:22:14 PM]

Roman: I mean how you restore mirror array , thats user operation after all to put new HDD [12:22:39 PM]

Mario: If a drive fails, we replace the unit [12:21:36 PM]
Roman: but then what the point of the mirror ? how you get data back ? [12:23:14 PM]

Mario: The point of the mirror is, if one disc fails, you can still access the data [12:22:55 PM]

Roman: Well I think its very strange approach ... anyway what about my problem , how I should proceed [12:25:01 PM]

Roman: ? [12:25:03 PM]

Roman: I mean to restore the drive functionality [12:25:31 PM]

Mario: At this point we do not have further instruction on how to approach with your issue [12:25:33 PM]

Mario: What is your serial number? [12:25:45 PM]

Roman: XXXXXXXX03 [12:27:22 PM]

Roman: So what are my options ? [12:27:55 PM]

Roman: I mean from throwing it away up to paying for "repairs" [12:28:30 PM]

Mario: Unfortunately your warranty has been voided by opening the unity [12:27:37 PM]

Mario: uit [12:27:39 PM]

Mario: unit* [12:27:41 PM]

Roman: ok you not going to fix it for free thats I got (even it is strange not allow to open NAS device) m so how much "repairs" costs ? [12:29:53 PM]

Mario: Unfortunately we do no not do repairs on our unit [12:29:23 PM]

Roman: Do you know how strange it sounds ? Smile This sentence you just typed ? "we do not do repairs on our units" Smile ? [12:31:24 PM]

Mario: Unfortunately that is our policy [12:30:35 PM]

Roman: Well I guess I will just buy some different maker NAS without HDDs [12:32:03 PM]

Roman: and use drives there [12:32:14 PM]

Roman: please tell someone who makes your policy that this probably going to be last IOmega product I buy [12:32:47 PM]

Roman: Bye [12:32:58 PM]

Mario: Is there anything else I can help you with? [12:32:23 PM]

Roman: I doubt :0 [12:33:50 PM]

'Roman: disconnected ('Concluded by End-user'). [12:33:52 PM]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Ends here <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Call me when it has Ethernet.
I/O is horrendous on these through USB2. It's useless if you want to utilize it's full capacity unless you're talking incremental and/or overnight backups. Average practical bandwidth for USB2 is about 20-25 MB/s or 90 GB an hour. 

An hour for a <100GB, assuming sustainable transfers!
Well, ciao Iomega, long gone are the days when people used to purchase zip drives because they have seen them on X-files.
And nasty, if I can still remember, something with having to connect to the printer port and install proprietary software....
Ay, vaya con Dios, largate...
..expect the inevitable 'click of death'.
Also holds 800,000,000 blog posts. (imaginary number)
Or the personal data of the population of britain times 666 (as I recall 1 CD has half the population's data so that's about 1.5GB for all of them and 1000GB/1.5GB=666).
Don't bitch about the click of death, because iomega gave a free new zip drive when yours had it, or if they even expected your had it, that's respecting customers above and beyond I'd say so there's absolutely no reason to come with some sour grapes things 10 years later.
Do not buy anything from this company. Their customer service is appalling. I will not bore you with the details but sending an unboxed refurbished product without leads as a replacement for a malfunctioning external drive in warranty, and for which I had already on their advice bought an external power supply in an attempt to solve the problem, is not what I expect from an honest trader. TO BE AVOIDED AT ALL COSTS.