Chicago (IL) - Iomega today unveiled a new 320GB external hard drive designed to appeal to MacBook Air users. It comes in an aluminum enclosure matching Apple's ultra-thin laptop and is thinner than the thickest part of MacBook Air (not too surprising since the MacBook Air is available with hard drives as well).

If you spent $1800 or more on Apple’s MacBook Air laptop to be able to claim that your notebook can fit in an envelope, we guess that you were willing to trade some convenience and functionality in exchange for those bragging rights. MacBook Air's small factor especially limits the storage space available – to a 80 GB HDD (which we believe will be soon upgraded to Toshiba’s new 120 GB models) or a 64 GB SSD. You could extend the capacity with an external drive, which, however, may be too ugly for your fancy notebook.

A glance at the device immediately reveals its target - the drive fits perfectly with the MacBook Air. "The eGo Helium delivers style with substance," said Iomega's vice president of marketing Peter Wharton. "It dresses up a highly functional 320 GB hard drive device into a durable and sleek package with plenty of storage capability, making it an easy-to-use 'eye-catcher' small enough to go anywhere."

eGo Helium comes in an anodized aluminum shell that is 0.63 inches (16 millimeters) thin and weighs about 7 ounces (200 grams). It comes with Iomega's Drop Guard design feature that protects the drive from drops of up to 51 inches (1.3 meters) onto (padless) industrial carpeting. The USB-powered drive comes pre-formatted with Apple's HFS+ file system, meaning that customers who run Windows 2000, XP or Vista will need to format the drive to FAT32 or NTFS prior to use.

eGo Helium is accompanied by two OS X backup solutions distributed as free downloads from the Iomega web site: EMC Retrospective Express, the common application that backs up user's data to a wide variety of internal and external storage devices and MozyHome, a backup software that offers unlimited cloud storage for backups for $4.95 a month. Both software packages are also available in Windows versions. Iomega said that the eGo Helium will be available worldwide in October for $149.99.