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September 27, 2006
DiskGO Backup Portable Hard Drive by Edge
 What a toy to play with! The DiskGO 3.5 BACKUP Portable Hard Drive is an easy to use and very affordable external hard drive. I opened the box, connected the converter to an AC outlet, the USB 2 cable to my notebook and pressed the on/off switch. It was recognized immediately. If you have read some of my other articles, you will know I added a USB Cardbus with two USB 2 ports as an upgrade. They worked fine with this drive. I also tested the drive on my desktop system. It performed well there also.
The review drive was an 80 Gigabyte unit that transfers data at 480 megabytes per second when using a USB 2 connection. They also make units with 160, 250, 300, and 400 Gigabytes. The drive is connected much like any external device. Just plug it all in and turn it on. It comes with an AC converter and a USB 2 cable. Hardware is recognized and then you are asked if you want to open a folder to read the files on the drive. You can also go to My Computer and click on the drive folder. In my case it is named EDGE_DISKGO (E:) on my notebook and (F: ) on my desktop. There seems to be 74.4 Gigabytes of useable space on the drive. I ran the Drive for 10 hours and found it warm to the touch but much cooler than my One Touch Maxtor external drive.
Under Windows XP you are not required to use the Safely Remove Hardware icon to the right of your taskbar as the device is hot swappable. Just be sure that the activity light is not blinking. Then turn it off before disconnecting the cables. Other windows versions will require the use of that removal Icon. Check for compatibility at the EDGE website.
The Backup4all Backup software that is included with the drive is very comprehensive and easy to use. The included software is V 2.3.4-761 OTB. This is a limited functionality version of Backup4all Professional edition. The Backup4all.com website has moved on to Version 3.4. Perhaps there is an upgrade in the works for future shipments of this drive.
The backup software was easy to install. The setup requires a little more thought and a magnifying glass since the manual provided uses very tiny fonts. After completing the install of the backup software I ran a 50 Gigabyte backup. It was quick and easy. I had a little trouble setting up the One Touch Button as there was no reference to its location in the instructions other than On the front of the drive. The front of the drive had one round plastic area that lighted up in blue when the drive was on and flashed when the drive is accessed. I contacted the company and they let me know that this was also the One Touch Button. They agreed that some text on the drive near the button would make it easier to recognize. The software uses standard zip files for the backup. This allows you to use most any zip product to locate and restore your files. A complete review of this backup software could be done at some future time but it is sufficient to say it is a good match for the DiskGo drive.
At 84.95 after a 20.00 mail-in rebate the 80 gigabyte drive is a great buy for backing up your many digital photos and a few valuable files or your notebook drive. Go to the DiskGo Edge website for additional details as well as pricing for the larger capacity units if you really want to backup your entire computer.
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