Iomega eGo 250Gb portable hard drive

USB flash drives may be more convenient to carry around, but if you’re looking for the best cost-per-gigabyte, a portable external hard drive is the way to go. Choose carefully, though – some drives are a little more than a 2.5in laptop drive slipped into a flimsy plastic box. Not so the Iomega eGo – this 250Gb drive is clad in metal shell so sturdy you can jump up and down on it with no ill effects.

Looking for all the world like a retro-fitted hip flask, the eGo is a bit of a looker for a portable hard drive. At 217g , this portable drive is rather heavier than most, , but that bomb-proof build quality is worth the extra weight – assuming you’re not interested in a drive you need to treat with kid gloves. The drive also has something called DropGuard – essentially software that parks the drive heads when a shock is detected so that the disk platters aren’t damaged.

The black metal body is capped with silver end-pieces, with one end housing mini-USB and full-size FireWire ports, along with a 5v power socket (should you need it – a power supply isn’t included) and a green disk access LED.

Performance isn’t much of an issue for a portable hard drive – as long as it isn’t miserable, of course. Fortunately, the eGo has no problems in this department and is, in fact, pretty nippy. When connected via USB2, copying the 435Mb Windows Vista Service Pack 1 file to the drive took 37 seconds, compared to 62 seconds for a 120Mb Western Digital Passport drive – which equates to 11.8Mb/s, compared to the Passport's 7Mb/s.

So, extremely well-made and rather nippy with it, the Iomega eGo is a good option if you need to access to lots of files on the move and don’t want a drive that you’ll need to molly coddle. And at around £100, it’s a bargain.