The Iomega SSD Flash External Drive 64GB

IT Pro Verdict

The Iomega SSD Flash 64GB is slim and attractive, thanks to its black brushed metal enclosure. Unfortunately its performance is far slower than what we'd expect from both a USB3-equipped storage device and from a SSD. If you must have a USB3-equipped SSD and can live without the warranty, you're better off buying a USB3 enclosure and a SSD separately and fitting them yourself, but we'd still wait until SSD prices are a little more sensible.

By Alan Lu

Published 24 November 2010 In Reviews

Solid state disks (SSDs) have one crucial advantage over traditional hard disks. Since they don't have any moving parts, they're considerably less prone to damage. This has led to SSDs being fitted in laptops, usually high-end models given their high cost. Nonetheless, their ruggedness, as well as their slenderness, makes them attractive for use in external storage too.

The Iomega SSD Flash is not only one of the first external SSDs we've seen, it's also the first we've seen to come equipped with a USB3 port. In our tests with portable hard disks, we've found that the USB3 models can be four times as fast as their USB2 counterparts, so we were eager to test the file transfer speeds of Iomega's SSD Flash.

Unfortunately, we found the SSD Flash's speed results to be inconsistent. When connected to a PC with a built-in USB3 port, large files were written at 62.8MB/s and read at 154MB/s. Small files were written at 31MB/s and read at 44.8MB/s. Although these speeds are faster than any USB2 hard disk, they're generally much slower than the best USB3 hard disks and SSDs connected internally using the SATA interface which can easily exceed 100MB/s in all our tests.

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