Iomega has launched its latest range of external hard drives. If the marketing is to be believed, it should have something to appeal to every audience — including the butter-fingered.

The most striking (albeit the least important in reality) feature is the choice of colored aluminum casings, available in red, blue or what’s billed as silver but looks in publicity photos to be more like ‘Mac white’. Fans of Apple’s unconventional capitalization will probably appreciate the model’s name as well: the eGo.

The drives should be particularly portable as they are 0.6 inches thick and weigh less than seven ounces. From a practical standpoint, they come with a Y-shaped USB cable so that you can connect them to two USB slots at once: that’s not a way of synching with two computers, but rather a way to draw enough power from computers which would not provide enough juice to power the drive from a single slot. On the software front, the drives have built-in back-up and anti-virus software.

But if your technology stereotype is neither stylista nor techhead, but rather clumsy klutz, the drives could be particularly appealing. The drives come with DropGuard, a technology which supposedly protects the drives against damage when dropped from as high as 4′3”. In the case of the 500GB model, the protection is claimed to extend to a seven-foot drop, which does the raise the question of what a portable drive would be doing that high-up in the first place.

While we at BLORGE would normally be suspicious of such claims, there’s some evidence that they might if anything be an understatement. Witness this YouTube clip where the Popular Mechanics website tested several drives, including previous incarnations of the eGo, and found that one Iomega model managed to not only survive a 15-foot drop, but also remained in working order after being run over by a truck.

So what’s the most theoretically-destructive incidents your peripherals have survived?

Related:

Entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 2:11 pm under Storage, Technology.

Read more entries by John Lister.
Stumble It!