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At first I thought this was an issue with iTunes, so I took my computer to the Mac Store. Buy at your own risk. When I tried to start up iTunes, the application wouldn't respond. I eventually had to buy a new drive and copy my recovered files onto that.
After a long investigation, we found that the problem actually was due to the Iomega drive not working. Now, there is no way to ascertain exactly why this happened. Then, one day I used it for about 12 hours straight -- editing, playing and importing music to my iTunes library. However, I have noticed that the drive gets very warm when used for long periods of time (since it doesn't have a fan, being very small), so I think this may have been the issue. This went on for a while, and then iTunes stopped responding altogether. It worked pretty well for two months.
After a while, I noticed it was taking longer and longer for mp3s to copy from my buit-in hard drive to this drive. It wouldn't even force quit, and I had to restart my whole computer. Numerous files had "input/output errors" when I tried to copy them to my built-in drive or to a different external drive; when iTunes tried to access these damaged files, it caused the non-responsiveness. In any case, it is extremely disappointing that this only lasted less than 2.5 months. I bought this to store my growing iTunes library. At the worst point, it was taking about 5 minutes to copy a 10 MB mp3.
I then tried copying as much as possible (about 90% of the files) to a separate drive and reformatting the Iomega drive, but this was unsuccessful; when I recopied these files back to the Iomega drive, some of them became damaged, presumably because they were being copied onto physically damaged parts of the drive.
I have an inexpensive Phillips DVD player with a USB port and after making sure that this drive is formatted at FAT32 (NTFS won't work with my DVD player), it reads and plays all my AVI movies. I have 86 movies in it so far at roughly 700-800MB per title so you see i have plenty of room. I purchased this solely as storage for some of my movies and so far it has provided me with what i needed it for. I also use it to play movies on the road in my laptop (via USB, of course) and don't have to pack DVDs.
You won't regret it. Aluminum housing, sturdy and well designed. Easily recognized by Vista, 250 GB of storage. If you need portable storage, you owe it to yourself to purchase this drive. This hard drive is really a great deal. The price was a giveaway. The only con is, I wish I had purchased the 400gb model before it became unavailable.
Its USB cable perplexed me: it has one regular USB plug on one end, and regular + miniUSB plugs on the other ends. No regrets, especially because when I bought it the price difference between the 33745 and the Prestige drive was huge, making it an even better deal. The power light goes green and you're set. As soon as the computer was working on XP I hooked it up again and transferred all the files back. I have no need for it.This drive doesn't come with a protective case, so I got a Caselogic Neoprene LHDC-1 case for it, adding $9.99 to the tab.
I hooked it up to the Vista setup and transferred all the files. The Iomega HD construction is rugged -- non-slip metal casing -- and very simple to operate. I'm not sure what the purpose is, but all you have to do to get the drive up and running is to connect the miniUSB plug to it and the other end (regular USB) to an available USB port on your computer. The fit is very good and I'm happy with it.This external drive has been replaced by the Prestige models in Iomega's lineup, but I decided to go with it because it was smaller and lighter -- deal makers in a portable hard drive. I began using the Iomega 33745 250 GB hard drive yesterday, because I needed to back data up to do a Windows Vista --> XP downgrade on my laptop.
Both times the computer recognized the drive immediately and everything worked flawlessly. There is an AC connector on the drive (AC sold separately) in case your computer's USB port isn't enough to power the drive, which can happen in older computers.
It includes backup software that takes a while to run. It has a lot of capacity for "normal" backups of files and folders. This thing works as advertised. Whether it would be able to restore your hard drive after a crash, who knows.
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