A 60-Gigabyte Guardian Angel

Most consumers neglect to back up their computer hard drives, and don't even think about it until they have a hard drive failure and lose all of the data on the drive. The data on the failed drive is sometimes recoverable, but that is time consuming, costly and not a sure thing at all.

It is far more reliable to purchase an external hard drive for archiving your data, but in the past these drives have not had much storage capacity and multiple external hard drives might have been necessary. In response to this market need, Iomega has released its 60-Gigabyte HDD portable drive that is packaged with Symantec's Norton Ghost 2003 and Iomega's Automatic Backup software to assist with data backup and recovery. Norton Ghost can clone a Windows-based computer's hard drive, including all software, system files and program settings, to and from the portable drive. Iomega Automatic Backup, which works with Windows or Macintosh systems, can schedule and perform full-system backups as well as incremental backups of specific folders.

The Iomega HDD 60GB drive is about the size of a Personal Data Assistant handheld device and weighs a mere 8 ounces. It runs at 4200RPM and is available in either Hi-Speed USB (USB 2.0, backwards compatible with USB 1.1) or FireWire configurations. The interfaces can be swapped out easily, which allows the drive to be used with different operating systems. The new Iomega HDD 60GB Portable Hard Drive is available for retail purchase now in the U. S., Canada and Latin America, as well as through Iomega's Web site at www.iomega.com . Price for the HDD 50GB Portable Hard Drive with included Hi-Speed USB interface (USB 2.0) is $379.95 US; and with included FireWire interface is $399.95 US.

Here at THG we picked the 40GB version of this as one of our suggestions in our Holiday Gift guide. With a 60GB version now shipping this makes it an even better product worth looking at.