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Iomega’s latest portable USB2 hard disk is the first we’ve seen to have a capacity of 1TB. It’s noticeably thicker than other USB2 portable external hard drives we’ve seen, but it’s still compact enough to slip into your bag or coat pocket. It feels very robust too thanks to its brushed metal enclosure, although the tacky-looking brown plastic endcaps spoil its appearance.
The Prestige’s file transfer speeds matched our expectations for a USB2 disk in almost all our tests, except when writing small files where it managed a sluggish 7.2MB/s. We’d expect small file write speeds of at least 16MB/s for a USB2 portable disk.
At £128 the 1TB Prestige seems expensive, but at 13p per gigabyte it’s actually very competitively priced for a portable USB2 disk. The Prestige’s main flaw is its sluggish small files write speeds. If you need lots of portable storage and can live with this then the Prestige is still a good choice. We expect rival manufacturers to release their own 1TB portable disks soon though, so if performance is a priority you may be better off waiting.
