Saturday, May 1, 2004
Iomega rev 35Gb/90Gb Removable Hard Disk Drive Reviewed
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 11:00 AM
"...Iomega are hoping that small businesses will do the same for their tape backups and adopt its removable hard drive based REV system. The concept is simple. Take a hard drive that holds 35Gb, remove the heads (placing them in the machine) so it can be thrown around the office and then imply that this is the next big portable and removable storage solution. In practice, luckily for Iomega the small desktop unit works. Connection is made through a USB2.0 cable and the spindle speed is 7,200RPM- meaning data transfer is fast and efficient. The diskettes- that cost £45 each- support the Windows UDF standard allowing you to simply drag and drop files on to them and the speed is almost as fast as a hard drive. The drag-and-drop functionality as well as the large hard drive-based format does provide its fair share of problems – mainly that it won’t work across platforms."
The review goes on to say that Iomega plans to double the size of the cartridges every 18 months and they are projected to hit 500 GB by 2009. I was disappointed to learn that the cartridges don't simply mount as a mass storage device - they required UDF support - meaning it's not quite as plug and play as a normal external drive. Still, it might be a good solution for project-based scenarios where you have a lot of big files that need to stay together, but you want to have different cartridges for different projects. I could see myself using something like this for video editing projects - one cartridge per project. What about you?
The review goes on to say that Iomega plans to double the size of the cartridges every 18 months and they are projected to hit 500 GB by 2009. I was disappointed to learn that the cartridges don't simply mount as a mass storage device - they required UDF support - meaning it's not quite as plug and play as a normal external drive. Still, it might be a good solution for project-based scenarios where you have a lot of big files that need to stay together, but you want to have different cartridges for different projects. I could see myself using something like this for video editing projects - one cartridge per project. What about you?
