Iomega 33720 FireWire 800/FireWire 400/USB 2.0 1TB 2HD x 500GB UltraMax Hard Drive

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Price: $259.99    

Product Feature

• Capacity - 1TB (2 x 500GB SATA)
• Formatted - HFS+
• Fast 7200 RPM
• Compatible with PC and Mac
• 8MB Cache Buffer or greater

Product Description

The triple interface Iomega?UltraMax Desktop Hard Drive 1TB adds secure, high-capacity storage to your computer system with a sleek compact design that compliments the Mac G5. This high performance, HFS+ formatted drive includes RAID 0 for higher data throughput and RAID 1 for data security, a three port USB hub and three FireWire?ports for expanded storage, delivers transfer rates of up to 800Mbits/sec and can be connected to any computer equipped with FireWire 800, FireWire 400, or Hi-Speed USB 2.0. Plus award winning EMC?Retrospect?software is included for full-system disaster recovery and easy, worry-free backup.

Iomega 33720 FireWire 800/FireWire 400/USB 2.0 1TB 2HD x 500GB UltraMax Hard Drive Review

I received the drive today (free 2-day Amazon Prime shipping rocks!). After an unintuitive setup and poor user manual instructions, I searched the Iomega website's support pages for help and used their free 1-to-1 chat option (free while your product is in warranty) to get everything figured out. Here's what I learned ... (NOTE: I am using a Mac. I have no idea what the PC setup is like. It's also important to note that these procedures are only good for THIS UltraMax disk because it can do RAID 1 and has 2, 500GB drives. If you buy a different kind of Iomega UltraMax, you'll have to do your own setup legwork or risk ruining your drive.)

The drive comes formatted as HFS+ for Mac set to RAID 0. I wanted mine set for RAID 1 to have a redundant backup of all of my important files and a cloned disk image of my boot drive. The procedure to use RAID 1, regardless of what you may read in your user manual, is to let the disk mount as it is out of the box -- just unpack it and plug it into your Mac. You'll see it mount on your desktop. Then eject the disk, wait for the disk to spin down (listen closely), and hold the power button on the drive in for 2 seconds until the light goes off.

With the drive off, push both pin switches on the back of the drive to the down position for RAID 1, then hold the power button on the drive in again for 2 seconds to power back on. You will get red lights on the front of the drive indicating a drive failure.

Find a paper clip or a pen and hold in the "rebuild" button on the front for 10 seconds. You'll see a series of lights turn colors. Eventually you'll get rid of the red failure lights.

As the drive remounts, you may get a message that the drive's format is not recognizable. Hit "ignore" and open DiskUtiliy. (If the drive mounts without the message, just open DiskUtility.)

In DiskUtility, select the appropriate Iomega UltraMax disk icon on the left and then click the "erase" menu at the top of the window. Select your volume format (e.g., Mac OS Extended (Journaled)), give your new disk a name, decide whether or not you'll ever need to access this disk from a computer using OS9 (then check or uncheck that box), and then click "erase."

Within seconds, you'll have a newly named drive appear on your desktop. Because it's now in RAID 1 format (the pin switches you pushed down earlier do the trick; you do NOT have to do anything for RAID in DiskUtility), the drive's size will have decreased from 1TB down to 500GB (using the other 500GB for a second, mirror image of the first).

(NOTE: Many people have posted on the Amazon site how jipped and betrayed they feel because the Iomega drives they're getting aren't really 20GB, or 500GB, or 1TB, or whatever. You will notice that this 1TB drive shows up initially as less than 1TB. And the RAID 1 configuration will show up as a little less than 500GB. This is NORMAL -- for all makes and models. I haven't seen a hard drive yet that didn't use a little of its own space for stuff it needs to run.)

You may notice some repetitive clicks every few seconds, even if you aren't using the drive or don't have anything copied to it. This is normal. The drive is either being accessed without you realizing it or it's simply doing a check to make sure the first and second drives match each other exactly (you'll see that both disk lights light up when you hear this clicking).

Once I got that all straightened out, I've been hitting it hard with backups all day. Backups with FireWire 800 have been really fast and reliable. I've moved over 100GB today without any problems. It's been on all day and is as cool as a cucumber. So far so good ... And you can't beat the price on Amazon, especially if you're setup for free shipping.

Rating this at 4 stars simply because the set up is really unclear, even for someone who knows a thing or two about drives, formatting, RAID, etc. I'll post back in a few weeks, months to let you know how it's performing.

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