Iomega UltraMax Hard Drive, FireWire 800/FireWire 400/USB 2.0, 1TB (2HD x 500GB) - 33720

List Price: $282.99 Discount Price: $263.99

Features:

• Capacity - 1TB (2 x 500GB SATA)
• Formatted - HFS+
• Fast 7200 RPM
• Compatible with PC and Mac
• 8MB Cache Buffer or greater

Accessories:

LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ 301199U 1 TB USB 2.0/FireWire400/FireWire800 RAID System

Customer Reviews:

No good for PC's; Bad customer support. [Posted on 2008-06-01]
I have a PC with Vista, and it's already inconvenient that you've got to reformat the drive for a whole day--but then there's a whole slew of other issues that quickly arise. After connecting the UltraMax to my PC, a "generic USB hub" driver installed itself on my computer. Next, I turned to the reformatting instructions on the CD, replicated on the Iomega website, but they were clearly written for Windows 2000 and XP (not at all useful for Vista). Finally I looked to Iomega's customer support, which was uninformed and inattentive. They actually made several suggestions that simple Google searches proved incorrect.

More on Iomega Customer Support: the live-chat-support paired me with an Iomega technician who would disappear for 5 minutes at a time, periodically returning with the wrong answers. The support forum is littered with horror stories of drive failures that got a string of generic diversion-type responses from Iomaga that went something like this, "is the power cable plugged in?," "you'll just have to live with it.," "cross your fingers.," or "contact Apple/Microsoft/(anyone else we can divert their customers to)." To top it off, Iomega charges something like $25 per call, and even charge people for email responses.

After my new drive finished it's day-long reformatting, I've discovered the USB2.0 data transfer speed tops out at a whopping... 4.5 mb/s. Not sure why it's so slow, but I'm confident that an accurate explanation will not ooze out of the Iomega support unit.

Bottom line: Iomega is clearly sloppy business that tries to nickel-n-dime its customers to maintain struggling revenue; it pawns pretty drives prone to failure; and it leaves customers in the dust with careless technicians and per-communication charges. I already lament my week-old decision to buy this drive.

So far so good [Posted on 2008-06-12]
Good product with competitive price. It's very compact and just a little noisy, but very fast and easy to use as long as you need it set up in Raid 0 and use it with a Mac. Works great with Timemachine, plenty of outlets in the back and FW 800 is definitively the faster. I use it for HD video editing and back-up.

don't buy this drive. [Posted on 2008-07-09]
I have four of these drives, designed to replace a bunch of older external drives; the first three work great, but the fourth, an newest ( less than a month old) just crashed, along with a 100 meg of files...Amazon says they will replace the drive if Iomega does not solve the problem, but the telephone numbers they list are no good.
If one out of four is good enough for your, then go ahead...But that is not a good record for me.

A month later, another drive is going South, no customer support, and too late to return it to Amazon.

BUY AN IOMEGA ULTRAMAX AT YOUR OWN PERIL!!!!! [Posted on 2008-07-22]
I bought an Iomega UltraMax Double 640 Gig drive, and the drive was dicey from the get-go.... with a wierd booting sequence that always made me uncomfortable. I use the drive for video editing, but not that often, so the actual hours on the drive were very low. I did, however, have about a month's worth of editing on the drive, when bingo, it failed due to the Iomega-made controller card failing. After a huge rigermarole to get through to their service dept, I learned that they ONLY replace the entire drive, and don't have controller cards available separately. In querying the tech support guy for 20 minutes, I finally determined that the ONLY way I can get my data off these drives is to buy another drive, and use the controller card from that drive to fix my own drive. Is this SERIOUSLY lame or what? Clearly, it's indicative of a company that only cares about maximizing profits, not serving customers, and when you're looking for a company trust fo storage of your critical data, you'd be a fool to deal with a company that operates on this principle.
Iomega used to be a good company years ago, but after they were bought by EMC, customer care must have been tossed out the door. EMC did the same to another great product, Retrospect, which I had used for years and had to drop for the same reason. Shame on you Iomega & EMC, and fie on all your houses.

No complaints after a couple months [Posted on 2008-07-30]
I bought this a couple months ago to use with my Intel MacBook Pro and have had no problems of any kind. The drives run cool, the fan is quiet, the Firewire 800 is blazing fast, and it spins up very quickly. I set it up for RAID 1 for redundancy and best data protection (which obviously cuts your storage space in half to 500 GB, as some buyers apparently didn't realize). The company does not provide very good instructions as to how to change from the default RAID 0 setting to RAID 1, but there is a great review below by J. Thompson that provides excellent, easy instructions. I am so pleased with this drive I will probably buy another soon.

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