Iomega Skin portable hard drive

Portable hard drives have gone from being a luxury to a necessity. However, they have also gone from being a dull looking gadget to one which looks really good. A case in point being the new Iomega Skin hard drive. It is completely different from the drab black colored drives which were being churned out till sometime back.

But is this drive all about look only, or does it perform well too? Let's find out.


Packaging and Contents

The Skin drive comes with the hard drive, Quick Install guide and the USB 2.0 cable in the box. The hard drive comes with some software pre-loaded, which I shall be explaining about later in the review.


First Impression

The hard drive which I got for review was the one which they call "Red Hot". There are two more color and pattern options available- Radical and Knock Out. Completely perfect if you are a hip-hop music fan! The dimensions are similar to the eGo range of hard drives, and the surface finish is pretty similar- marginally glossy, shiny, but not a fingerprint magnet!


Performance

The Skin hard drive is a USB 2.0 hard drive, which means in terms of performance, it will be very similar to the other USB 2.0 hard drives out there. The setup is simple- plug and play. No drivers or installation needed.

While transferring an 800MB file from the PC to the hard drive, the speed spiked to about 90MB/s but finally stabilized between 35 and 40MB/s.

In the reverse of the above process, the transfer rates were pretty similar. The data transfer speeds of between 30MB/s and 40Mb/s is very normal for a USB 2.0 hard drive.

The Skin drive comes pre-loaded with the vClone software. What this software basically does is allows you to make a virtual image of your primary PC and saves it to the hard drive. Now, you can plug in this hard drive into any other PC, and using the saved image, access your programs, favorites etc., just like on your primary PC. Quite useful also in case the PC crashes, or you manage to delete some data, by mistake.


Verdict

At a price of just under Rs 6k for a 500GB hard drive, this is a good deal. Even though Iomega are charging a slight premium, but for the fact that this drive looks outstanding and allows you to clone your PC more than makes up for the slight price difference.


Price- Rs 5900


Specs:


- Portable hard drive
- USB 2.0
- 500GB storage space
- Multiple color and pattern options
- built-in vClone software