Iomega is a manufacturer of storage devices with a long Mac-Tradition. Some might still remember the legendary ZIP-drives with removable media of 100 to 750 MB capacity, which nearly all Mac-users had. The eGo BlackBelt is a very interesting devices for Macs. Beside its black design with "protection belt" it attracts attention with its generous capacity of 1 TB.

Regarding interfaces it offers USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b), the later even twice. The second FireWire 800 port allows a chain of drives - something only possible with FireWire. At the time of writing there is only one model of the eGo BlackBelt on offer. It's list price of 189.- Euro is not really low. However, it is available at about 130.- euro in online-shops.

Our tests are again performed on a number of already well known devices, e.g., HP ProBook 6540b, MacMini (GF9400), IOI FW 800 ExpressCard and MSI 880 GMA E-45 Mainboard. In addition a Digitus PCI FW400/ FW800 adapter, the Verbatim Store`n`go for Mac and the LaCie Quadra d2 1TB are added.

The case of the BlackBelt has a high-gloss black finish and a chrome-colored strip. The silicone belt somewhat prevents fingerprints, scratches, and most notably a slipping on slick surfaces. The rear houses the ports (1x Mini USB 2.0 und 2x FW800) and a small Status-LED. Unfortunately an additional power supply, which would allow a connection to 4-pin FW 400 interfaces (without dedicated power supply) on PCs, is missing.

On the Mac (Mac Os X 10.6) the Iomega eGo BlackBelt delivered its full performance and achieved a maximum of 79 MB/s at reading and even 83 MB/s at writing via FireWire 800. But, it also reached best results via USB 2.0 on the Mac, i.e., 36 MB/s at reading and writing. FireWire also allows chaining external devices. We tried it with three hard drives (LaCie d2 Quadra, BlackBelt, and Verbatim for Macs) and could not observe any performance losses. Even here the result of 80 MB/s convinced.

On the PC (Windows 7 HP 64 bit) it did not always work. E.g., the ExpressCard/34 FW800 from IOI on a HP ProBook 6540b did not offer enough power to start up the 1 TB hard drive of the BlackBelt, although we used an additional USB connection for power supply. Although it did work with 2x USB 2.0 the recorded result of 25.5 MB/s disappoints. While the transfer rate increased to 27.8 MB/s via USB-3.0, this is still far away from the performance on a Mac. The performance improves when connected to the 6-pin  FW400 Port of our Digitus PCI card. Here we record 35.4 MB/s and on the FW800 port the transfer rate increased to 63.7 MB/s. Although a chain connection works on the PC, the transfer rate drops to just under 37 MB/s at the end of the chain.