IOGear ION GHD335C250 Tri-Select, 250GB, 7200 RPM, USB 2.0 Firewire, External Hard Drive

First, the "bad": this 250gb hard drive comes partitioned into seven different sections each 31.9 GB in size. There's an 8th partition that's 8.93 GB. Add it up and that's not 250. Plus it's a little annoying to see 8 different drives pop up on your desktop. I would have preferred fewer partitions. This means that if you have over 31.9 GB of related data (say, MP3s or digital photos/videos) it needs to be copied onto 2 or more different partitions/drives. I'm sure there was some reasoning for the 31.9 GB amount but the numerous partitions aren't ideal for keeping track of things.The "good": seems solid, well-designed, and worked right out of the box on Windows XP.I have a 120GB SimpleTech drive (with 1 partition) that works good and a 160GB Western Digital Media drive (1 partition) that works equally fine so I'm subtracting 2 stars for the 8 partitions on this 250GB drive.

I recently bought this drive, and I am pleased to get this external drive to ensure the safety of my data on the iMac at my workplace and the compatibility of FAT32 system to allow me port individual files between my home PC and that iMac.To clarify the confusion in the previous review, I want to stress the compatibility issue for the out-of-box 8 partitions formatted with FAT32. This allows PC-Mac crosstalk in my case. In their manual, they provided the following instruction in case you are a dedicated PC or Mac user.Setting up your drive:If for some reason you need to re-partition your ION™ drive, you will need to keep in mind that FAT32 limits the partition size that can be created, through the USB interface, to roughly 32GB when using the FAT32 file system. If you have Windows 2000 or XP you can format the drive with NTFS which has no limit on the partition size. If you have Mac OS 9.2 or greater, you can format the drive with HFS+ (which has no limit on the partition size) using the Disk utility found in Mac OS 10.x.x.Although the short instructions did not explain everything about the bundled Dantz Retrospect Express 6.0 and the Tri-Select Button Management software, it is not difficult to assign the three buttons to different backup needs. I just hope my review can help other people choose the right external backup drive.

I've had this drive for about 2 years now and it the best drive i've had yet. When I got it the first thing I did was wipe the drive and install one large NTFS partition. After reading the other reviews that were left here I now figure out why the included software never worked. I never cared and thought it was dumb anyway. But let me tell you this drive is shaped a little funny but it has traveled in my backpack and been bumped and dropped and scratched up and generally been beatup. Still working good. Also I love the dual firewire/ usb 2.0 connection.

This external hard drive is one of the better constructed and visually appearing ones on the market. It is vented for heat reduction, has a soft blue glow, and since it is vertically mounted it does eat up desk space like a big brick (many competitors do.)I saw in another review that the FAT32 format was a welcomed feature for MAC users and it should also help for those older operating system like Win98. Due to size limitation you end up splitting the 250GB into 32GB chunks. All of those partitions are a pain and uses up drive letters that in a corporate office are needed for drive mappings. Unfortunately, if you blow these away and make a large NTFS partition, the Retrospect software no longer works. I have not found a way around this yet.