Iomega unveils MacBook Air-styled 320GB drive

Iomega on Wednesday announced it will soon release the external eGo Helium portable hard drive that is designed to match the styling of Apple’s MacBook Air. Iomega is showing off the 320GB capacity drive at the Apple Expo tradeshow in Paris this week. The tapered aluminum shell of the drive houses a 2.5-inch HDD which comes formatted with the HFS+ file system used by Mac OS X. At its thickest, the drive is just 0.63 inches high.

Iomega’s internal Drop Guard design allows the drive to withstand 4.25-foot drops onto industrial carpeting without damage, the company claims. The drive connects and gets all its power via a USB 2.0 port, eschewing the need for a dedicated power cable.

With the purchase of the drive, Iomega offers two free downloadable backup programs, including EMC Retrospect Express for Macintosh 6.1 and the MozyHome backup service that gives users 2GB of online storage for free. The eGo Helium can be re-formatted for use with Windows only, where the MozyHome cloud backup can also be used, or as FAT32 for use with either OS. Out of the box, the drive supports Mac OS X 10.1.5 or higher.

The eGo Helium portable drive will launch globally in October, priced at $150.

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