If first impressions are anything to go by, you’d buy it on looks alone: it’s sleek, sexy and lightweight. Sound familiar? The drive was specifically designed to go with a Macbook Air, but that doesn’t mean you need one to buy one of these beauties. It weighs 200 grams and is 4.75 inches long, 3.45 inches wide and 0.63 inches thick. The design is simplistic, with only two inputs – a mini USB and a power source. A USB-powered cable is included.

The aluminium drive easily fits into the palm of your hand or your back pocket (but we don’t recommend carrying it around in that manner) and has a drop guard feature that protects the drive from falls of up to 1.3 metres (we also don’t recommend testing this out!).

If you’re using a Mac, the drive is recognised once plugged in. However, if you’re using a Windows PC, you will have to reformat the drive NTFS (New Technology File System). Step-by-step instructions are provided for this procedure.

The drive has a USB 2.0 interface, so transferring files should be fast. A quick test of transferring a 700MB file proved that it can be done in 30 seconds (23 Mbps) while transferring 700MB of smaller files (150 mp3 tracks) copied in 40 seconds (17.5 Mbps).

A bonus is a backup solution that Imega offers with the drive. You are given licence codes for EMC’s Retrospect (depending on your OS) in the box that will provide you with a backup solution. All you have to do is download the software. More information can be found online at http://www.iomega.com/getemc/

Written for Digital Life magazine, Aug-Sep 2009

Other memories include me deleting important DLL files and other stuff from the root directory. Ok, that was a big confession for me. (Remember I was a teenager – don‘t judge me, OK?) My dad wanted the hard drive cleaned out because too much space was being used too quickly (sound familiar?), so I did a quick “clean-up”. Hahaa. That turned out in me being “banned” from using the PC ever again. Of course that didn’t last very long because I knew my way around the way my dad didn’t. Lucky our techie lived in the ‘hood.

Yes, experience is the best teacher.

One of the reasons I love technology is that it simplifies life. Which brings me to the point of this post, finally, after all that unnecessary babbling. I received this nifty little gadget from iomega and I cant begin to tell you what an awesome piece of technology it is:

It’s a ScreenPlay TV link adaptor. Because I watch my TV series from a flash stick, I end up switching my TV to PC mode (I have a screen linked) and the files are played back in a less than perfect quality (that of the PC). When displayed on a 42” plasma, it does not look its best.

The adaptor allows me to plug my flash stick straight into the USB port and watch instantly. No more hassle. The quality is way better obviously. It has its own remote control (one more to fight over). Read about its features here.

Rad.