Normally I don’t do a lot of product reviews, aside from business books. But I’ve had such a good experience with my Iomega external hard drive that I wanted to share it.

As a writer and graphic designer, hard drive space is crucial! And especially when you’re talking about graphics files, space gets sucked up really fast. But more than providing extra storage space, an external hard drive is vital for backing up and protecting your important documents and files.

The model I purchased about a year ago has 500GB of storage space. It’s about the size of a paperback book and came with a removable stand. It connects to my desktop computer via USB and I can transfer or copy files with a few mouse clicks. Having this external hard drive allows me to keep just my current working files my main desktop computer, yet any files from the past year can be easily accessed if need be in a matter of seconds.

When I leave town for vacation or business trip, the Iomega fits right into my fireproof, waterproof, thief-proof (I hope), safe. The Iomega gives me a great deal of comfort knowing that my important files and work are stored securely.

I’ve had other external drives, from manufacturers who shall remain nameless…and honestly, the Iomega so far is the most trouble-free. I’ve had other drives fail due to burned out power sources. That may not seem like a big deal, just buy another power cable – unfortunately that particular drive model was discontinued about 6 months after I purchased it (they didn’t mention that when I bought it, nor was it on sale at the time). A new power source had to be special ordered from the manufacturer. Granted, they did it all free of charge, but I could not access any of my files on that drive for nearly a month while the issue got resolved. Needless to say, I purchased my Iomega and quickly transferred all my files from the old drive to the new one and put the old one in cold storage.

Iomega makes drives compatible with PCs and Macs. The come in all shapes, styles and sizes. Iomega also makes some other pretty cool peripherals. If you’re looking for an external hard drive for storage or for security or both, I recommend Iomega.