The eGo also comes equipped with something called DropGuard, which sounds a lot like the motion-detecting, read/write head-parking data protection system so many laptops come with these days. So we tested it accordingly and... er, encouraged the device to fall off tables a few times onto typical office carpeted floors and even - ahem - knocked about a bit by a Timberland-clad foot.

...and blue and red

And afterwards it worked fine. The speeds were unaffected and the drive unmarked or damaged in any way. We had no trouble getting data off the drive.

Test Results

Results in MB/s
Longer bars are better

To assess the eGo's performance, we used Register Hardware's standard drive test: we copied a 1GB folder containing 100 10MB files to the drive. We then duplicated the folder on the drive itself before copying it back to the host computer, in this case a 2GHz Core Duo-based MacBook. All the tests were conducted half a dozen times and the timings used to calculate an average.

Related stories

• Verbatim 500GB desktop external hard drive
• LaCie's rugged rubber drive hits 500GB
• Iomega wooed by new EMC offer
• Iomega says no to EMC
• LaCie Golden Disk 500GB external hard drive
• IronKey 1GB secure USB Flash drive
• Seagate FreeAgent Go 160GB external hard drive
• Sonnet Tempo SATA Express 34 ExpressCard eSATA adaptor
• Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB external hard drive

And then we did the tests all over again. Because we simply couldn't believe how speedy this little hard drive is. The numbers here aren't directly comparable to those from previous hard drive tests we've run because they were conducted on a different machine, but the eGo's read speed - as measured by the copy to PC test - is impressively high for a drive of its class.

Verdict

Aside from the ever-so-slightly less tasteful red and blue variations - let's face facts, almost all technology looks better wearing black or silver - this little drive can't be faulted. It did take a little while for the drive icon to appear on the Mac desktop, but then really, on the grand scheme of things, an extra second or two isn't really worth mentioning.

More comments…