Everyone remembers the Iomega Zip Drive – we all had one, it’s okay to say it. I’d lost track of the company for a while, but they’re striking back with a new version of the device, which probably will get mixed reactions. It’s called the Rev and it’s essentially a HDD split in half – the head and mechanisms are in the reader, and in each removable cartridge is just a platter, which holds 70GB. They were proud of the cartridges’ durability, and the guy repeatedly slammed the cartridge onto the table to emphasize it.
They also had some tasteful little external drives; the black one below is 250GB. The big silver thing is their take on the external/internal thing; two hot-swappable drives stuck in an eSATA-capable Mac Pro-like enclosure for 1.5TB of storage. In any case, they seemed like solid pieces of hardware, but I’ll wait for performance data before dropping any bills.
Iomega is dead to me. I remember trying to install a zip drive in a computer I had about 10 years ago. Total P.O.S. product with lousy tech support. (The zip drive, not the computer.) Never again.
More click of death? After being ripped off for 2 Zip drives that clicked themselves to death within 90 days, never again.
There are probably a few people that need 70GB removable read/write storage, but the vast majority don’t. Hopefully Iomega will find success in selling to those few.
Assuming (rather safely) that these things will never catch on, you’ll need to carry around your disk and the drive with you. Good thing that’ll be easier and lighter than carrying around a USB hard drive.
Oh, wait.
What is the price?
You know, like many of you my initial reaction was “WTF, who needs this POS,” but upon reflection a product like this might actually make sense for me…
I work with video for a living and it is not uncommon for me to have large quantities (50gb+ is common) of raw and edited video data which I want to archive for completed projects. That’s a lot of DVD-Rs for a project, but simply chucking it on a big HD has not been an adequate long-term solution for me either- what if the drive fails? With this solution, since the read/write heads and motors (the parts that typically fail on a HD) are separate from the platters (making it essentially non-volatile storage), if the moving parts fail, I’m not SOL, or paying someone big-bucks to (maybe) retrieve my data in a clean-room somewhere…
Now admittedly, I’m a ‘niche user,’ so I’m far from an indicator of a viable market, and the cost per disk would have to be low enough to make sense vs. an actual HD, and/or the major hassle of burning off several DVD-Rs at the end of every project lifecycle. Assuming the price is right, I could see myself using it, though…
OK, after checking out the website, the 70g disks are $70/ea, and the drives themselves are $600 retail. Average seek time is 12ms(read) and 13ms(write), spindle speed is a paltry 4200rpm. Since it’s USB, transfer speeds may be additionally throttled by the controller, but assuming no external throttling, they claim burst transfer rates of 60mb/sec with a max data transfer rate on the outer disk of 25mb/sec and 12.5mb/sec for inner disk. In other words, expensive, with slow read/write rates, lousy spindle speed and poor transfer rates in comparison to just about any ‘average’ hard drive you can buy.
Iomega is pitching it as competition for small to medium companies which currently use tape backup and for that I suppose it could be (more-or-less) a decent alternative, but they’re also pitching it to a secondary market of people who want to use it for their digital media content… Personally, I don’t think the economics work in that scenario…