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Hard Gear: Iomega's eGo Helium

I plead guilty to the sin of impulse buying. It's not often that I do that, but the Apple store in the West Village has such a cornucopia of irresistible temptations. So a sleek and elegant 500GB Iomega's eGo Helium Hard Drive is now part of my external hard drive panoply.

While its design (and its intent) makes it a natural for the MacBook Air, I'll be using this baby with my Acer netbook, in tandem with my other portable hard drive, G-Drive Mini. I deemed the eGo Helium's weight of 7oz to be an important factor in the decision. It only offers one USB 2.0 port, but that doesn't bother me as I only intend to use it with the said Acer. In contrast, my G-Drive Mini has two FireWire 800 and one USB 2.0.

Naturally for a product that really looks like a baby MacBook Air, the device is formatted with Apple's HFS+ file system, which meant I had to reformat it for my Acer's Windows XP OS. A minor pain in the neck, but nevertheless a pain. Since XP pretended that the drive didn't exist, I had to refer to Iomega's website and read (imagine that!!!) the instructions as the "short-on-details" manual included with the device didn't address that issue properly.

It now works nicely, and for my forthcoming photo~expedition to India I will have storage capacity of the eGo Helium's 500gb, the G-Drive's 320gb and the Acer's 160gb (well, almost 160gb). Not bad.

Now, all that's left to do is to paint the Acer in a shiny silver aluminum color and paste the Apple decal on it!

Update: It was annoying that the device wasn't recognized by my MacBook free USB port, but the solution was to plug it in the USB ports of my Cinema display.

This post was written by: beemagnet77

BeeMagnet is a professional graphic designer, web designer and business man with really strong passion that specializes in marketing strategy. Usually hangs out in Twitter has recently launched a blog dedicated to home design inspiration for designers, bride, photographers and artists called HomeBase