Dr MadCow's Articles Web Portal V3.60

Article Properties

Article Title: IO Magic 250Gb 3.5" External USB2 Hard Drive Review

Article Author: Daryl Quenet
Article Category: Hardware Related
Times Read: 6967
Date: 2007-09-05 00:00:00
Pages: 1

I recently purchased an IO Magic 250Gb External USB2 Hard Drive for an offsite backup of my photography, and to backup another hard drive while I redo the RAID configuration. The IO Magic external drive is very slim and appealing looking product. Inside of the of the IO Magic 250Gb External is a Samsung 250Gb 7200RPM drive according to online sources. USB 2.0 operates at 480mbit (roughly 50MB/s) so a 7200RPM drive was a must on my external hard drive requirement list, and when doing large backups you will definitely notice the difference.

Not having previous purchased any IO Magic hardware my senses were on high alert to ascertain the quality of their product. At an attractive price of under $70 Canadian for an external 250GB hard drive, this was a good deal. I usually like to stick to quality name brands like Western Digital, but every so often I’m a sucker for a discount.

After getting the unit home I plugged in the IO Magic 250GB External into one of my empty USB2 slots, and immediately found out it came preformatted with FAT32. Now anyone that read my Mediasonic HM1 review knows the pitfalls of running partitions over 32GB on FAT32 with Windows XP or newer. I quickly formatted the hard drive over to NTFS, and got ready to start copying my files.

I have a rather large photo collection of my family, and from my British Columbia Photography Hobby. I also do Web Development so having a client data backup is a must (and RAIDED if you can afford it)! I quickly started copying files over to the external IO Magic drive (using the cmd command prompt running xcopy /s/e/v r:. under XP64), after less then 5 minutes I got an error message, and had to restart the external hard drive with its power switch. I thought I might have knocked it, or hit a cable given its location on the floor (although I highly doubt it), so I started it copying the 150GB of photos again and left the room. This time it managed to finish.

At this point I was starting to warm up to the IO Magic 250GB External USB2 drive, it performed fast enough for a USB2 drive, and the drive access was barely audible when copying large data sets. However when I started to backup my Web Development files things went down hill. When copying photos the drive performed beautifully because of the relatively large file sizes, I shoot only in RAW image mode so the average file is 8MB+.

However my Web Development folder contained roughly 40,000+ files from tons of websites. The backup started out fine, so I walked away. At around 10 minute point of transferring these smaller files Windows XP 64bit cmd prompt gave me a “File creation error - The system cannot find the file specified.” message. I played a little more with the drive but overall I found this product to be a major disappointment.

Unfortunately my conclusion on this product is that I’m going to be returning it. If money wasn’t an option I’d buy some sort of NAS with a Gigabit interface, but the good ones start at $300 and go up quickly. I have a replacement product in mind, so there might be a review coming in the next month. When I come across a quality product I’ll do a thorough testing before the review, because backups and external hard drives are a must when dealing with huge data volumes.