Back when Windows 95 was cutting edge and hard drives came in tiny sizes such as 1Gb I heard a useful piece of information: " Space is at a premium but whatever you do, don't compress your hard drive".

Now we have exceeded the terabyte barrier space is no longer a problem. The sensible advice now is: "Whatever you do, definitely back up your data".

Having learnt from experience I now have three external hard drives but this is definitely not a case of overkill. Modern hard drive failure rates are very low but there is no such thing as being too careful. My primary HDD is a Maxtor 500Gb which holds multi-media. Secondly I have a Iomega Select 320Gb which is solely for making multiple images of my iMac. Thirdly I have the Select's big brother, the premium Iomega Prestige which is additional storage over two partitions for media and games.

The Prestige is a nice looking drive with a quality brushed steel case with the Iomega logo etched onto the top surface. The unit is powered by USB but there is also a power point for a 5v adaptor positive polarity.

In terms of size the drive is small measuring 8.1 cm x 13.1 cm x 1.5 cm (W*D*H) and weighs in at a petite 190g which is about 20% more than the average new smartphone. The case houses a 2.5" HDD with a 5400rpm spindle speed, a 8Mb buffer and a data transfer rate of 480Mbps.

Using and configuring the device is absolute simplicity itself. Assuming you are using the supported operating systems, (Windows XP and later and also Mac OSX 10.1 and later), the device is auto-detected and installed as a visible external drive. Processor requirements are very modest needing only a Pentium 2 or a PowerPC G3. My drive was already formatted when I bought it but it is good practice to do so again. You could also partition the drive if you wish but I would recommend using a third party application to do so.

The 250Gb disk is the entry level capacity, both 320Gb and 500Gb are also available and they come with a stand for mounting the device vertically. If you intend to use your drive for simply backing up data or media you will find using an average 10Mp camera will allow storage of well over 50,000 high quality images.

The device is built by Iomega which is an American company who specialise in storage and networking products. They were bought out by the EMC corporation for over $200m in 2008.

Summary:

High build quality combined with a small form factor make this bus powered drive a good investment. It is easy to install and use and has proved reliable. It comes with a one year warranty.