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Iomega Plans 20GB Portable Drives
Shivetya writes: "This is cool, the heck with using a palty 650mb of CDROM storage for playing MP3s in your car. According to this article over on CNET IOMEGA may just have a 20gb solution coming with their new "Peerless" system." As michael exults: "Yay! more portable drives that are totally incompatible with everything else including all other Iomega drives! Yay!"
I bought a 1G Jaz drive to back up my valuable data. Wrote backups, checked them, they worked, everything was fine. First time I actually needed them, which happened to be a few weeks after the warranty on the drive expired, the data was gone. I should have had another copy for backup, you say; but that was the backup! Months of work down the drain. Nothing that I can't live without, but a lot of stuff I wanted to keep and can never replace. (Including all my old GW-BASIC games from when I was learning to program.)
Upon visiting the Iomega Web site I discovered they were in the middle of a Valentine's Day promotion. "Tell us," they said, "your love story about our products!" The trouble with love stories is that they don't always end happily...
I did eventually find a tech support email address. I wrote a long, detailed, and polite message explaining my problem and the steps I had taken to attempt to fix it (the description above is drastically abbreviated, although accurate as far as it goes). I received a form letter inviting me to call a 1-900 number and pay $29.95 on my credit card for technical support on my Zip [sic] drive.
Because of this experience I do not intend to ever buy, nor recommend to my clients, any Iomega product again.
Here's the problem: My company buys 30 Zip 100 disks every two to three months, we put ads on them and mail them out. They never come back (even though we ask nicely), so we have to eat that $300 every three months. We're starting to send out more on CD-R, which is more trouble but only about $1 ea.
Iomega must be smoking some serious crack if they think that businesses are going to buy 10 to 20 of these little drives at $200 a pop, and send them out, never to be seen again. If I'm going to send out a 20 Gig hard drive, I'm going to send it out in a big external case so that somebody knows they need to return it.
Today I bought an external 80GB Maxtor Firewire drive for $350. You know, one of those armor plated go anywhere things. Chain'em together and create a data center on your desk (or in your car connected to your laptop). Give me a break. This new Iomega piece of crap is rediculous. It doesn't even qualify as too little too late, more like "remember that last idiotic product Iomega came out with right before they went out of business".
FireWire PCI Card $24
FireWire PC Card $30
80 GB FireWire Hard Drive $325
I'm not sure why anyone is defending Iomega on this.
It refers to Jaz and Zip drives and media which failed with the endless sound of a 'Click, Click, Click....' as the drive head tried to read data from the disk (but failed) over and over again. Iomega denied it till the bitter end until they lost the class action lawsuit against them last month on this issue. Even then I don't think they admitted fault (their product was defective). But the ultimate insult - and this is why so many people hate them - is that for restitution they were able to get the courts to allow a remedy whereby in order to get a refund from Iomega for their defective product - get this - you have to buy more Iomega products! That's right, the refund in the class action is in the form of a rebate only valid on future Iomega purchases. It's kind of the last straw for a lot of people around here. They really don't sell price competitive products (never have except for a few short months at the outset of each the Jaz and Zip). They seem very good at marketing. But people just don't like a company that doesn't take its customers seriously. So most people are avoiding these products like the plague. As you can see Iomega is trying to artificially raise demand for their "peerless" product by not having it be available when they announce its availability. There are too many alternatives out there for much less (or with much more storage).
It's not compatible unless you buy the "interface" adapter from Iomega. So, yes, the drive itself (the thing you carry around) is intentionally incompatible with everything else except Iomega's "interface" adapter. You have to buy an adapter from Iomega to use Iomega's drive with anyone else. Don't get me started on the Jaz and Zip drives. Click....Click....Click.... Ugg. God, I hope nobody is dumb enough to buy a 10 GB hard drive for $360 from Iomega when you can get an 80 GB portable FireWire hard drive from Maxtor for the same price or a 60 GB ext. FireWire from Western Digital for even less.
If the smaller Zipdrives have Click of Death, what would you call it when these die? Thud of Death, Thunk of death, Clunk of Death... ?
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Please make the media for these drives cost at least twice as much as a hard drive of the same size, Oh, and never ever bring the price down so nobody will feel compelled to use it for anything.
When Zip first came out I tought "They are going to kill floppies" Of course floppy technology was pretty much on it's death bed already, but Zip drives looked to fill the void left by floppy drives, and IOmega was poised to make a fortune on the media once people started thinking of them as disposable and started buying 100 packs. Then I realized the parallel port interface most people used was slow, and IOmega never seemed willing to drop the media costs down to the
Maybe IOmega really stands for Incredibly Overpriced media electronics guarenteed awful.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Perhaps the LS-120 didn't take off, because in my experiance with the LS-120 drives, they suck.
We started getting SuperDrives in 98 when the iMac came out, and they might last 3 monthes and then the drive was dead. And boy those drives were slow. Even reading old floppy drives...they were slow. We tried them for about a year, then gave up on them and started to buy cheap little VST floppy drives that didn't require a power brick like the SuperDrives.
A zip 250 came as a "freebie" with this laptop. After having owned and dealt with zip's before, I haven't asked for any spare disks--I *like* being aboe to retrieve my data . . .
hawk
Um, the poster was infact talking about FIREWIRE drives. These drives are just a $60 PCI card away from being compatable with just about any PC still running.
Alternately, you could just yank out the innards and put a newer, more compatable chassis around the disk itself.
As hardware manufacturers start to address the external bus standards that are now finally available on PCs, the value of overly proprietary solutions from the likes of Iomega quickly tend towards zero.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Here's a CLUE:
How many iterations of anti-virus software is out there?
How many brands?
How often do you think they have to update it?
If you're needing anti-virus protection, why use a specialized program that protects just that peerless drive (and needs updating, just like the others) when you can get one that protects everything including the boot sector of all types of bootable drives?
Your reasoning is flawed from the get-go.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Seems to me that a microdrive is something on the order of a TypeII CompactFlash in size and currently only has something like a maximum of 1Gb of capacity. 10 and 20Gb is something like 10-20 times that- unless of course they're using the same tech (which, while is tougher than most HDs even while operating is still somewhat fragile compared to CF) to make laptop drives that can be used this way...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Well, that, and they fired their CEO a couple days ago. That's usually a tipoff.
Actually I've read a couple of reports now that these new drives are pretty fragile and have a shitty trasfer rate (ie, 1 hour to move a 1Gig of data)
older 1 gig drives could suffer from click death as well if they were on the same SCSI chain as a zip drive that died... the problem wasn't a hardware problem no matter what they tell you. I spent several months with some friends idependently researching the problem. Our best conclusion was that the problem was actually transient in nature and originated from a series of "driver/iomegasoft" distributions at the time when the problem came up. We tested (and lost) several drives working this out. Why? Well we didn't care, we had already dumped the format and had stacks of disks and drives around that could have gone in the trash... We were actually able to trace our "infection" back to a single internal IDE zip drive that triggered the failures on all of the other drives.
What's the click of death? I've heard the term used in this discussion, and I've never heard it before.
The PhatNoise car mp3 player has used this system for a while to get a hard drive into a car player. The only hard part is getting your hands on a box from the beta release.
www.phatnoise.com
If you would check Iomega's site about the new Peerless you would notice that they have a firewire version in both the 10 and 20 gig configs.
As the unjustly modded down for being off-topic poster of the parent of this comment observed, "It truly is peerless because you can't use their drives with anyone else (without buying an adapter from Iomega) or use anyone else's hard drives with Iomega (without buying the hard drive from Iomega). At least they are honest in their product labelling. Iomega's new peerless drive truly is peerless. What a wonderful example of doublespeak."
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Previous posters have already made the point that the per-gigabyte cost of this new IOmega drive is preposterously high. But if compact, removable media is what you need, may I humbly suggest you look at the Castlewood ORB?
I have one of their external SCSI units. The drive is also available in EIDE, USB and IEEE 1394 (Firewire) flavors. I have five platters, which I use to hold mostly games. The drive works flawlessly with Linux and BeOS, and only exhibits one minor annoyance under Windows (which is probably not Castlewood's fault; Windows doesn't completely flush the desktop's caches when ejecting a platter). The drive seems a bit slow at writing data. This may be because I have the drive configured for highest reliability rather than speed. Though I haven't subjected it to especially hard use, I have yet to suffer any data loss. The media cost is almost reasonable at $30 for 2.2 Gigs.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Castlewood other than as a satisfied customer.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
To begin with, I will state right now that I am an employee of Iomega, though I have nothing to with hardware. It's great to see that no one on this site ever bothers to read up on anything, and just posts whatever excrement happens to pop into their heads as fast as possible.
I'm just pissed off that there really are so many morons that post here.
Now, that's out of the way, and you all hate me...
The peerless drive has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with Jaz (non)-technology. It is nothing at all like the Jaz, and suffers from NONE of the limitations of the Jaz. It's faster, it's FAR more reliable, and best of all it's SEALED MEDIA.
It also has nothing to do with Zip technology.
Or click.
Or any other 10-year old glorified floppy or unsealed hard drive tech. This shit is brand-new.
Yes, I agree the price is pretty sick.. but what do you expect? Where are all the other portable solutions that fill the gap the Peerless meets? Don't even bring up the "portable" firewire and USB hard drives, because not only are they MUCH larger, they are MUCH heavier, and require MUCH MUCH MUCH MORE POWER. I'd really like to see you hook a portable usb hard drive up to something like a portable mp3 player, and expect it to stay powered on for more than a few minutes. Get real, please.
I also have to question the grip on reality some people have. This is not a shiny, happy world, and companies are FOR SURE neither shiny, nor happy. I want to know what other company, in the same position as iomega, would have done anything differently in light of their own click of death? I seriously doubt ANY of them would admit to anything.
If you knew how much hardware you all had in your machines that had firmware full of holes, you would be sick. Try getting the manufacturers to admit to it.. and good luck.
None of you have to buy this thing, and at that price I don't blame you. But I really wish SOMEONE would take the time to fucking read about something before shooting off at the mouth.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
Those cheap external drives, the ones that are $160 for 10GB and $400 for 60GB, are the size of a Dreamcast and weigh about five pounds.
The removable drives Iomega is putting inside a convenient cartridge? They're a less than a quarter the size and weight. Standalone USB/Firewire drives in that class run about $350 for 10GB and $450 for 20GB. If you have computers equipped to handle them at home and at work, those carts start to look like a darn good deal.
Hey, if you want to carry around big drives that weigh more than your laptop to "save money", that's your business. But the graphic artists who have sworn by Zip drives since they came out will like these a whole lot. And as the guy who does purchasing for a 40-person design staff, I'd sure rather buy a few Firewire Peerless docks and get $200 carts for the staff that need them rather then buy all of them $450 pocket firewire drives. The heavy ones aren't an option. Try telling people carrying a laptop bag to carry one of those big "bargain" portable hard drives. Would you want to carry one yourself every day? And take it on trips?
Iomega is a has-been. Get a portable Firewire drive.
Well, looks like my thoughts are echoed by a number of users here. I used Magnetic-Optical equipment from Iomega before they decided to become a mass retailer and was happy with the performance. With the introduction of the Jazz drives I purchased a number of units. All in all I have been disappointed with the quality of these units, not to mention the price.
Iomega was interested in gouging customers rather than making a dependable product. Costs were in my opinion excessive, plus their need to deliver a product to lock in users was complete BS.
As far as I am concerned Iomega burned their bridges with me and I will never purchase equipment from them again.
Lando
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Which is especially apt considering the amount of pr0n one can fit in 20GB. Maybe Iomega could make that part of its marketing campaign...
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Exactly. How portable is this thing if you're the only guy in the world with one?
.. What happens if your shiny new IOMEGA wotsit (disk or unit) goes and dies, leaving you shafted for recovering your data. Ugh.
:)
That and that fact that 20GB of storage that isn't part of a RAID array or has various backup procedures surrounding it just scares me
PS: Sig quote is 'You ever dance with the devil by the pale moonlight?' (I always ask that of all my prey)
--
Delphis
Delphis
Let's say that you have a computer, and that I have a hard drive. The hard drive has a computer, but no data. It does, unfortunately, have a compuvirus. When I insert my hard drive, the compuvirus takes over your computer.
.. If the drive can be written to, it will be 'taken over' in much the same way as a regular hard disk would be. If you introduce virus killing software then yes, it would kill the virus in BOTH cases.
What?
Don't be silly.
--
Delphis
Delphis
another drive bay for $9:
http://www.1stclasstech.com/remhardrivmo.html
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Sig Return: 204 No Content
look at the internals of the HDD...so a single flake of the electromagnetic coating flakes off and floates around inside the drive.....within a few days, or a few years, that flake WILL get between the heads and more of the coating, flaking off more coating, etc. Even after severe drop/shock to a drive, you might not notice anything for some time...I won't consider a drive that has been dropped to be in good shape...I will not use it for any critical data unless it is to be inserted into a RAID5 array. (Even then I make a note on the case of the drive what happened.)
Just my perspective in life...
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Sig Return: 204 No Content
Iomega is so excited about this evolution of the Jaz drive. I think a more appropriate name would be Iomega Jiz.
bp
With almost every other type of removable storage (DVD excluded) it was incompatible with everything that was on the market previously.
Punch cards didn't work in cassette tape drives. Cassettes didn't work in 5.25" floppy drives. 5.25" floppies didn't fit in 3.5" drives. 3.5" floppies didn't fit into CD rom drives.
So what? This isn't something that Iomega invented, it's the way that things work.
If you don't think it's a good idea, don't buy it and it'll die like the LS-120 has pretty much done.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Out of stock? Yes...
"The company said it has a backlog of about 25,000 units. It will begin to ship drives this week to those who ordered early, and the models will hit retail store shelves in late June."
pulled from this article.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
If you care about performance and you bought a drive that hooks up to a parallel port, then the problem is with your sense of judgement, not IOMega's ability to build drives.
With my 10 year old Amiga and a SCSI Zip drive, such a transfer takes less than a minute and uses less than 10% CPU. If such performance figures are important to you, then you should upgrade your pentium system to something of at least 1980s technology.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There's no way such a drive would survive the same type of handling that I subject my 100MB Zip disks to. (And let's not even get into what kind of abuse CDRs and floppies can take.)
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
CD-R/CD-RW are much cheaper anyway, and have similar data rates except for writing
And I have every right not to buy it because of this, and Taco has every right to be sarcasticlly excited about it. Face it, if it's not a widespread technology it is useless. You won't have anyone to share the media with and it won't be portable in a useful sense. The only portable storage formats that have ever taken off are ones that are either open or easily licensable. (Oh, and that have a price somewhere in the average range. I can get 40Gb of hard disk for the price of one of these cartridges!)
The big difference is that the sieve is reliable.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
This sucks. I *JUST* bought a fucking RioVolt this past Sunday. Don't get me wrong, I *LOVE* my RioVolt but a device based on this would kickass.
Oh yeah, if you haven't seen the riovolt yet, It's a diamond rio device that actually reads burned cds of mp3 or wma files. It also functions as a portable cd player. It's pretty nifty and great for taking to the fitness center.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Yes, AMD did purposely make their new CPU incompatible with all the other CPUs out on the Market. That way once you buy this new solution from AMD you are forced to buy more of them from AMD if you want to expand AND STILL REMAIN COMPATIBLE.
Why do I bother?
Blar.
Check out http://www.iomega.com/peerless/features.html and scroll down to the "compatible interfaces".
Sorry son, you lose this one.
Blar.
Yeah...Iomega purposely made their new drive incompatible with all the other 20GB portable drives out on the Market. Same with their Zip and Jazz drives, right?
Blar.
Simple:
....
If you would check out www.iomega.com instead of relying on c|crap, you'd know that there's a 1394 and SCSI module available
If you work with MANY multimedia files, large movies etc, burning cd's don't make sense. Hard drive space is "cheap", but swapping hard drives isn't fun either.
:)
At least now, you can create a divx/dvd, put it on a disc and reuse it. well, at least a small dvd
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I fail to see how installing a new, blank hard drive makes you vulnerable to computer viruses. I've been sitting here for five minutes trying to come up with a scenario where a virus infection occurs from installing hardware that requires no software to run as it is all in the BIOS. I can't think of a single case where something like that would occur. Perhaps you should check some facts before posting something that you obviously know very little about.
As everyone mentioned 3.5" ide drives with a removable rack are very inexpensive. I bought a 60 gig drive for $149 at fry's a couple of weeks ago.
But what about laptop 2.5" drives? 9.5mm 20gb drives are only about $120 now. I'm sure somebody could make one of these portable.
And remember, you don't even NEED the drive unit, just an IDE connector.
By the way, I've tried one of those USB external drives, and they're not all they're cracked up to be. I don't know about the latest linux kernels, but redhat 7.0 didn't recognize the drive. Even with windows they require a driver CD to tag along. However, the worst thing is that they're painfully slow.
I think firewire drives may be ok, but firewire isn't ubiquitous yet.
"*Not recommended for use with systems running AMD based chipsets"
Oh, well...
load "linux",8,1
Actually, it's:
H"ave you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?"
But anyway...
A quick search on Google reveals several places that sell laptop hard drive to desktop IDE interface converters - usually around $15. Someone please explain to me why I would spend a few hundred dollars for a proprietary (-sp?) solution, or spend that same money (or a little less) on a much smaller laptop hard drive with a desktop converter. Maybe someone even makes hot-swap bays for them?
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
As cool as huge storage for MP3s is, I hope manufacturers don't continue to ignore the analog parts of their MP3 players. Most portable players have sound that just sucks. The Intel Pocket Concert is the only exception I've ever heard, and even it could use some improvement.
The point is, MP3s can sound really nice when you use a good DAC and headphone amplifier. Even highly integrated versions of these components can add a few bucks to a player -- but why not offer customers an option to step up the sound quality of all their MP3s, no matter what the bitrate?
-David.
The 95% CPU utilization is due to Windows parallel port driver not being written properly. I saw the same thing on OS/2 years ago.
Then as a test -- one of the first things that I did when examining Linux four years ago -- I set up Linux with my parallel port Zip drive. I used X as a rudamentary "extra load" while copying to and from the Zip drive. I saw no visible slowdown.
Granted, Iomega wrote the Zip PPA driver, but there may have been only so much they could do with what they had to work with (Windows parallel port driver)
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
As I said, this was four years ago and one of my first experiences with my own UNIX-like installation. Yes, I am aware of uptime and ps (and top) now. I wasn't then.
Starting X on a system is CPU and disk intensive. Doing it in addition to a file process over a parallel port is aptly referred to as a "rudimentary extra load." I wasn't looking for exact timing. I was checking the oh-so-subjective "does it act slower" benchmark; I was eyeballing it with a wristwatch.
The fact remains, unlike DOS/Win or OS/2, Linux did not stutter, wince, or otherwise bog the system down when making a large file transfer with an Iomega parallel port Zip drive.
I know how you feel about the lameness filter. I triggered the lameness filter while posting a C++ code sample. What is slashdot coming to indeed.
Note: It's generally a good idea to benchmark items on working samples -- how long it takes you to get done what you would normally want to do. uptime, ps and top would not necessarily be a better indicator in this case.
And on a completely different note, I had a drive that clicked, but after a while, the clicking stopped and the drive functions fine to this day. Go figure.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
So if I'm not satisfied, what do I get in return? Personally, I think I'd like some rebate coupons for some reliable products.
< tofuhead >
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It is still the dark of night.
$90 for a 2.5" USB-ide drive case, $150 for a 20Gig laptop drive. For $250 for the carrier, get a Neo 25 MP3 player which also acts as a USB drive ;)
I'd be all for a drive like this as long as it ends up being cheaper per-gigabyte than a conventional hard-drive.
Even CDs are getting pretty close on a $/MB scale now, assuming around $1.50 for a CD and jewel case.
- WrexSoul
\/.
vvv
- WrexSoul
\/.
vvv
I mean, for the price of just one of their 20 GB cart, you can buy a full blown 40 GB hard-drive (5400 rpm) and a rack to go with it. It's twice more capacity, way more reliable (we all know removable magnetic storage sucks) and you don't need to buy and carry around a 250 $ reader, as any PC (and even Mac) has IDE. Best of all : an HD needs no drivers at all and the warranty is 3 years (while I'm pretty sure Iomega won't offer more than 1 year considering how crappy their past preducts have been)
Frankly either the media is too small, or it's really too expensive, but either way it's already dead considering HD prices.
Great. Now instead of losing a paltry 100MB due to click of death, I can lose 20GB!
I trust Iomega to hold my data like I trust a sieve to hold water.
-Adam
This message created with 80% recycled bits, 20% post user.
This sig 80% recycled bits, 20% post user.
The point? Riding my bike to the CS dep't with two 100MB zip disks (a 15-20 minute ride, one-way), downloading stuff there, and riding back is muchos faster than my 56K line...my zip drive, as much as I hate Iomega, has been invaluable (understand, of course, that the school standardised on ZIP disks for large format floppies before I got here...)
yeah.
Iomega couldn't make a system that transferred 10 megabytes in 5 minutes over a parallel port without consuming 95% of the resources on a pentium 300 system and now they expect me to trust that they can do a 20 gig drive?
I think I'll give this one a miss.
Someone slap that idiot. How are they supposed to be compatible with previous drives??? Find a answer to that question and then I'll give you permission to complain. Storage devices are very technology dependent, where the actual PHYSICAL properties of each drive change as they gain the ability to store more data on them. It's not like they're just writing software.
Between that comment and the stupid review of Myst III, someone should really consider kicking "Michael" out of here. He provides absolutely nothing beneficial to this site.
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+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Yeah, those SyQuest drives, which were neither open, licensable, nor cheap REALLY suffered in the market, didn't they... it's not like they became a standard used by advertising agencies, magazines, and television stations (some of which are still using them) or anything.... oh, wait...
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
ummm...a 40 gig laptop drive in a compact external USB chassis?
I'm sorry, but 40 gig 2.5" drives simply don't exist, and in response to the first comment, pricewatch = reality - shipping..this reality = pricewatch + shipping. Also, are those small form factor 2.5" drives (laptop drives)?
/nutt
Well, I lost 4GB and about $400 when my SparQ drive died after 1.5yrs of use. My friend's LS120 fried after 2 yrs of use (but at least he could get a new drive, SyQuest went bankrupt). Another friend's Zip100 freezes the computer whenever transferring data to/fro the drive, plus there is that problem of Zip drives losing data.
I wouldn't ever trust my data in a removable or portable drive again unless it was solid state.
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Does that mean nobody else would have a drive like mine?
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You can get a 40 gig ide hard drive for $80 according to http://www.pricewatch.com, and a removable drive bay for $25 from http://www.buy.com.
(I mention the 40 gig because it seems to be the best gig/$ ratio)
-prator
As far as I knew though, these can maintain a 15MB/s transfer rate. This is according to the Iomega site, of course...
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Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Now, as to whether this new storage media from Iomega will be as "rugged" as a floppy/zip/jaz disc, I could not find anything...the fact that the read/write heads are integrated with the disc, like an HDD, the above argument against durability of an HDD may apply just as well to the peerless disks.
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Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Now what would be really cool is if I could plug my USB digicam into it and save the pics to a big disc. Then I can shoot 1600x1200 TIFFs on my vacation without having to have haul around 312 (expensive) CF cards or a laptop.
Here's my concept: a USB mass storage device which can be directly connected to another USB mass storage device of the same or different manufacturer. The device would have a small monochrome LCD screen which allows you to view the filesystems on both units and copy files from one filesystem to the other. It should comply with existing USB mass storage standards and be capable of mounting filesystems of type FAT, FAT32, ext2, minix, etc.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
as long as the kernel supports it!
"Being right too soon is socially unacceptable." - Robert Heinlein
This article isn't on CNET, it's on ZDNet. Someone better fix this, or there'll be hell to pay...
I kinda assumed they chose Peerless as a response to RIAA's attack on Napster, as in:
"If folks can't use a Peer to Peer network system to trade files, we'll let 'em pile everything on portable drives so they can swap music in person. The system isn't P2P, it's Peerless!"
This might even be slightly interesting if we didn't already have hot-pluggable drive technology available via FireWire. And you don't even have to buy an expensive dock for those, either.
This announcement is about as exciting as when they introduced the Iomega CD-R (also late to the market). Sadly, Iomega continues to disappoint...
What are they smoking over Iomega?
Check out this 20 Gig USB Hard Drive from APS Tech, a very reputable company. Only $179.
What, doesn't everyone have a Mac? ;-)
When they first started out, Iomega expected everyone to buy a Zip/Jaz drive, and the disks themselves would be the "portable" element. I believe they did this mostly because they didn't have a choice. USB wasn't around yet, and the only other widely available interfaces didn't lend themselves to being as portable. This new drive represents what they've been moving towards over the last year or two, and I think it's a great idea. Basically eliminating the need for anyone to have a compatable drive by just making the drive portable as well. What's going to kill this device is the same thing that killed all their other devices: it's friggin' expensive! Not only will the drive run you about $400, but the disks will probably be expensive as well. Even a 1Gb Jaz disk still costs $100! Ok, so they might not be moving in the right direction (like a portable DVD writer...) but at least it's closer to the right direction. The only way I see these getting very popular is if they drop the price $300 or so.
--- Rectum?! Damn near killed em'! - Confucius
That crap about viruses is just that - crap. And if you don't want to open up your PC get a USB or Firewire enclosure for your drive. I bought one for $70. I can take my drive anywhere I want and plug it into any Windoze PC whenever I want. Never caught a virus off it once and it cost half what the equivalent Iomega product costs.
--
-- SIGFPE
The removable drive bay is a cheap solution, but it's not very easy to use (for non-technical types), and it's not very portable (unless you can install a drive bay everywhere you're going to use it -- and this doesn't solve the laptop problem).
A "better" (but a bit more expensive) solution is to buy an external drive case with either a USB or firewire interface. It's pretty easy to find these (although USB is the only really ubiquitous interface supported by all the major OSes). You'll probably want to get the version for 2.5" drives, as the 3.5" drive cases are pretty big. The 2.5" drives also tend to be more shock-resistant than 3.5" ones. These cases are more portable and are easier to use (just plug them into the USB or firewire port -- you don't have to crack the case and hope there's a free IDE cable).
until holographic storage arrives. And even then I won't buy from Iomega.
You can laugh without eating a sandwhich, but you can do both if bring one.
I'm pretty sure the jacket thingy doesn't have very much on board, and I wonder how many plug-unplug cycles you get before something breaks. And you can get 1394 to USB converters, 1394 to SCSI, etc.
The only advantage to doing it this way is the specific case of SCSI: you can swap out a cartridge without having to reboot. SCSI doesn't do hot-plugging very well. (On many systems you can hot-plug a SCSI device and refresh the bus and all will be well, but on other systems [e.g. WinNT] you must reboot.) This doesn't seem like enough of an advantage to make it worth locking yourself in with Iomega.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
I want to know what other company, in the same position as iomega, would have done anything differently in light of their own click of death? I seriously doubt ANY of them would admit to anything.
"So's your old man" is not an excuse. The fact remains that Iomega produced defective products and then reneged on its obligations under federal and state law to make its customers whole. Any company that does this deserves to get smacked, both in court and in the market, and it is not an excuse that other companies might do the same.
--
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delenda est Windoze
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Hot-swappable USB and Firewire drives which are cheaper and more portable (both in 2.5" and 3.5" sizes) than this iomega drive have been out for several years. I'm still not quite sure what makes this news relevant or interesting.
Roll on to 2001. All the computers in my university has mass storage media... and they are Iomega Zip drives! There are CD recorders around but they are not the RW type, i.e. I am paying a 'download charge', as a result of which I have accumulated a rather tall stack of coasters...
Yet another one now... sigh... oh well. Don't count me in, my next upgrade will be DVD-RAM.
-michel-
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
And what will it be? Jaz? Zip? Peerless? MemoryStick? PCMCIA? Device Bay?
i looked at the iomega page, they are sold out. but i found one on ebay for those interested... CLICK. and NO, it is not mine or anyone's i know. i just thought that this would be interesting. as of now it was at $300 and the counter is at 31, with 2 bids. i'm interested to see the slashdot effect on ebay. if any.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
Those of us with experience with Iomega products will disagree. Any portable storage is good portable storage if it doesn't lose its data every few months. And when the drives day a few weeks after the warranty is over, it sucks too.
As for durability, you probably shouldn't use any electronic device as a softball, so I'm not too impressed if Iomega wants to sell an indestructible HD for twice the price.
The advantage of the rack is that you can painlessly upgrade, or reuse older, smaller drives. You can buy extra inserts and use the rack interface as a backup port.
For moving data around fixed/semi-fixed locations, nothing beats the hdrack in price & performance. I don't think the Iomega stuff is gonna provide ATA100 speeds...
The Internet has no garbage collection
You could simply buy a big HD for your laptop, and bring that around instead of the removable disks. The same goes for portable mp3-players or anything else small. You don't need removable media, just buy more mp3-players (or whatever your favourite unit is). With todays prices on most electronics, this seems a lot cheaper than carrying around removable harddisks.
On the other hand, if what you want is large storage capacity for archival or backup-purposes (and therefore need some kind of removable media), then CD-RW or exabyte tapes seems much more reasonable to me. At least when it comes to price. Shure, they are more inconvenient, but also a lot cheaper.
Aside from the hype and the obligatory Iomega bashing, this drive actually doesn't look that
bad from an usability standpoint.
It is really a three part device:
A hard drive :
(The disk cartridge is a sealed design with the
read/write heads included in the cart)
A drive bay :
(The cart slides into a bay which I assume
provides the power and data connection for
the cartridge)
A connection bus cradle :
(The drive bay attaches to a cradle that has
the connection type - firewire - USB - SCSI,
that connects to the users system)
The nice thing about this idea is that it frees Iomega
from the trouble of building the interface into the
drive itself. Allowing them (hopefully) to concentrate
more quality control on the individual components, and
allowing for easy adapting to changing intefaces on
multiple machines.
One potential downside I see, is that the cartridge and bay
are designed to stand up in the cradle, taking an awkward
amount more of vertical space than previous Iomega drives.
And the true performance of the drive in this configuration
has yet to be benchmarked.
The biggest problem Iomega faces are people like me, who
stopped using my Jaz drive last year, because the Castlewood
Orb drive is easier to lug back and forth to work, and
CD-R/CDRW is a better medium for long term data archival.
Q: why did I buy that 1GB JAZ drive many years ago when I was using a Videotoaster Flyer...
A: Because it was cheaper to buy 1GB cardriges to archive video, than buying extra SCSI hard drive (yes my Barracuda 4GB costed something around 5000$ back then)
Q: Why did it get so popular
A: Because it could hold shitload of data for a very decent price, plus it was fast and used to be reliable for the needs.
now when I read
The drive will sell for about $250 while the disks will retail at $160 for 10 gigabytes and $200 for 20 gigabytes.
that kills the "cheap way to backup and retreive fast" possibility (heck you can buy loads of hard drive and it'll be about the same price, and with all those cheap raid on board, do a mirror if you want to be safe).
Transport? well at these price levels and lack of popularity (you can bring your zip, you'll find a drive, JAZ 1GB, probably too, JAZ 2GB? getting rare, Click? even less popular, so that tells a lot), At these level, I was saying, I'd rather buy a USB enclosure and a 80GB drive, or if I had cash to burn, a nice NAS.
Sorry Iomega, you understood that your JAZ were too small for the current need, you've fixed that, but Bob wouldn't say "the price is right".
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
What are those, SCSI drives? 40Gig drives are going for around $160 locally (last time I looked).
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Sorry. Must have missed the reference. I was thinking 3.5" form-factor. Totable, but not quite the same as a 2.5".
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I dropped an old 2 giger a couple of feet. Worked fine afterwards. Your friends paranoia about hard drive placement has no real baring on the real world...
Rate me on picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
the 'uptime' command or 'ps' will tell you how much CPU you're using.
What is slashdot comming to?
Not to mention the fact that I wanted to title this comment 'X' instaid of 'Xwindows' and slashdot's 'lameness filter' thought I was a troll because of it.
Rate me on picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Why don't you try a google search?
Rate me on picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
I think my subject says it all...
Rate me on picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
Why not just carry around a 30GB hard drive in your pocket...it's cheaper and probably faster.
"-- removable media should kick hard drive's asses, assuming the media cost isn't ridiculous."
;-)
"while the disks will retail at $160 for 10 gigabytes and $200 for 20 gigabytes. "
Does that answer your question? I can get 80 Gigs of regular HDD at those prices. And the HDD is proven, unlike this drive.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Is that the title you wanted?
:-)
Go ahead... ask how.
One of my rules on slashdot is to surf at -1. Yeah, I hate those goatse.cx ASCII arts too, but without them I couldn't have a one letter title. Or, then again, without them I could. Ahh, such a tangled web we weave.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
"a disk roughly the size of a handheld computer or PDA"
:-/
You know what else is rougly the size of a handheld computer and has more space? A hard drive.
You know what is roughly the size of a PDA and has more space? A laptop hard drive.
You know what costs the most, is proprietary, is not consumer tested, and comes from a company with a history of low quality drives? The new iomega drive.
I can only think of three words right now:
Thanks for nothing.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
This will be popular with the same people JAZ is popular with... Graphic/Video/Music design studios... and the companies who print/copy/press their output. If they think the average user wants this, they are dead wrong.
Josh Sisk
they've already gone out of business once, don't you think it's possible it'll happen again?
I am suprised they are still in business because Iomega has consistently screwed over their customers. I had a ZIP. CoD'ed (Click of Death'ed) all my overpriced zip disks.
Iomega refused to replace it. It's went into the trash around 1998 so no chance of joining the class-action. Not that I want a coupon for more of their shitty products anyway. I also had a Iomega Buz Multimedia Producer (video capture board). About 2 months after I bought it they stopped supporting it. Despite the fact that I had a 1 year of tech support included. Every time I called their support to complain about big chunky black lines it was busy. It then took them 2 years to release driver code. This company is useless...
At 20gigs you can put a couple of DVD's on it. Thank the gods for DECSS! You can upgrage from mpeg layer 2 to divx:) or something and put all the episodes of SouthPark on one disk. Though a 20gb disk costs $200 which is only $50 less than the drive itself. I wonder if they are selling the drive at a loss and making up with it for the sale of the disks. Hopefully over time the price of these will drop so that a 20gb disks costs about the same as a 1GB jaz disk does today.
Why do you say that Clik is dead? They are coming out with the 100MB versions in the Fall. The Hipzip is a great player, and being able to carry around a few $10 disks while exercising or working in the lab is really excellent. The alternatives such as flash are just too ridiculously expensive to even consider!
Iomega Media Costs 101:
$100 for a 1 GB Jaz Disk....$160 for a 2 GB Jaz Disk....20 GB "Jaz" Disk....????? Maybe $500 - $650 if they keep with the trend....
I have a 2 Gig Jaz drive and I love everything about it other than the fact that with that kind of cost per megabyte --- do I have anything that is worth storing on these pricy things...
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I know one guy that has a devoted client list, 8O+ years old, expert only in Corel Draw - doing very well thank you. typically takes his work to a service bureau. Accessing anything over a network results in data overload and brain lockup for the guy.
Obviously, he is not a geek. Of course, a lot of small businesses are just like this.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
For all I know it was a bournoulli drive, or something like that.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You every dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?
"Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must first set yourself on fire." -- Fred Shero
Your numbers are off. If a 100MB Zip disk held a week's worth of data, then this new 20GB cartridge will hold 200 week's worth, or almost *4* years' worth of data. That's progress!
My external Zip Plus drive (you know, the one with the SCSI interface that barfs unless it's the only device on the chain) recently died, leaving me with 2 disks' worth of unretrievable porn. CURSE YOU IOMEGA, AND YOUR INFERIOR PRODUCT.
The article says that the drive is $250; 10 Gbyte disks are $160; and 20 Gbyte disks are $200.
Now, why should I spend that much when the lowest price for a 10 Gbyte external USB drive on Pricewatchis $141, and a 20 Gbyte is $168?
C'mon, the form factor can't be worth that much, now, can it? Especially considering it's ``roughly the size of a handheld computer or PDA.''
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
I realize that this is portable but I have some serious misgivings about that price. I know that I won't be buying one until that price drops by about 90%. A portable HD docking station (internal PC collar and sled) runs $10 for IDE and a 20 gig HD on pricewatch today is running around $67 for just the drive. that is $77 for a equally portable solution (though a bit larger)
Now I do realize people will point out that this is requires where ever you go to have a docking station also in order for this to work. Well that is true for the iomega solution also. They will have to have one of these drives also when you arrive.so we are even on functionality in this case.
The other solution is to take the drive with you and plug it in and install it, so don't forget those install disks! In the portable HD arena we have the USB external enclosures. today on pricewatch $167 for 20 gigs of storage, and no driver disk needed to install it. We are looking at the same size and weight for these two solutions
I think that iomega has missed the first part of what we want, CHEAP portable storage. At nearly $400 for a drive and a 20 gig disk I think that a lot of people will be giving this a miss.
Apparently I am not the only one as their CEO resinged today also, 2nd one in two years, not a good sign.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
I don't see what's so exciting about having a 20gb zip-drive successor that costs 200$ per 20gb cartridge when you can buy a standard 40gb hard drive for half the price. Just throw in a good removable rack thing and you've got your portable storage right there, without the need for an expensive disk reader. IDE hard drives have become so damned cheap they're practically disposable these days. I'd sooner buy a DVD-R than yet another expensive Iomega "Innovation" that will click and die in a year or two.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
or screw it all and get a 75gig 3.5 inch firewire drive for 450 buckaroos.
who runs this company, a bush cousin?
Standard default rules!
Iomega was one of the bigest supporters for CPRM just behind IBM. They lobbied and even spent huge amounts of money into CPRM research and influence in the ata-Eida spec commitee.
Also Iomega is very friendly with hollywood. I am too lazy to look up the news article but it is mentioned on slashdot under past stories after the cprm spec was defeated. I believe one of the stories even had a link showing who was for and agaisn't cprm. You have been warned.
Do not be supprised if the drive is copy protected.
http://saveie6.com/
Eh? Now, I own a Jaw 1GB and it must be 5 years old now. All the media I have (about 7 disks) have the same age. I never, ever lost a single byte on those disks, though one of the media was used for a long time as a secondary harddisk (the others as backup media).
I also own a Zip 100 Internal SCSI, which died about two months ago. Up until the drive died, I never lost any data on the zip disks I owned (about 15 pieces). Of course, now I do not know if I lost anything because Iomega doesn't ship internal SCSI drives anymore. (And no, USB or external SCSI doesn't work on that computer, yes it is an older computer)
And now for the nostalgic of us: I also owned a dual Iomega Bernouilli 90 drive. Now those drives rocked in the time harddisk were a mere 100Meg big. Oh, and, no, I never lost a single byte of data on those drives either. .ico folders on your Windows partition...I bet it has an icon called Bernouilli or something similar.
Hey, I should just get them out of the box and try if they still work. Last time I looked, the drivers for Zip/Jaz do support the Bernouilli. Just take a look at the
I guess I can be called an Iomega fan, because for me their hardware just worked fine. (Anybody got a working Internal SCSI Zip drive for sale? Anybody? )
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Bernouilli is old Iomega technology. Very reliable! I didn't find much references on the product on their site, but it is one of their products: look here .
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Yeah, it's costly and incompatible with your DVD/CD players. But it's not like it doesn't have any advantages.
sure, they're not violating any god-given rights
however, they do rather efficiently dig their own graves AND make the world a whole lot less convenient for the rest of us. consider iomega jaz vs cd-rw... jaz holds about 50 percent more, it writes/rewrites faster and it's more durable. had iomega opened the jaz spec and allowed other companies to make it, jaz could very well had become a standard. had it become a standard, the media would have been mass produced properly, and the prices of the media would have dropped signifigantly. they would have made more drives, sold more media, and it would have been cheaper for the customer. however, they decided that they wanted to be the only one in the jaz game, nobody bought it, and it became another incompatible standard that wasn't really standard. iomega effectively dug their own grave. open standards aren't about the greedy masses wanting to be able to feed off of the work of the diligent few. open standards attempt to help the end user by setting standards, and allowing other people to use said standards to make the final product cheaper/more familiar/easier to use/etc...
lets say that somebody wanted to send me a rather large file... i'm on a dialup connection, so he sure as hell isn't going to email it to me. i'd tell him to put it on some sort of removable media and overnight it to me. if he says 'well, do you have a jaz drive?' i'm going to say 'fuck you, put it on cd' and he's probably going to say something like 'how about a 2.2GB castlewood orb drive? have one of those?' to which i will reply 'fuck you, put it on cd'
at this point he'll break down and tell me that he doesn't own a CD-r, because he didn't feel that iomega was violating anybody's god given rights.
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
As michael exults: "Yay! more portable drives that are totally incompatible with everything else including all other Iomega drives! Yay!"
This is a limitation of actuated-head, platter-based storage more than a big conspiracy to get you to buy new drives all the time.
You have rotation speed, track density, sector density, signal-to-noise ratio, flux, form factor, and more to worry about.
It's just a fact of life with our current method of mass-storage. We can't buy a drive today and expect it to read tomorrow's NextBigThing(tm).
I also think it's impractical for a standards body to come up with some sort of portable mass-storage standard because it would be too slow of a development process. Once the 10GB standard was finalized, everyone would want the 20GB standard and so on. By the time everyone could agree on what the standard should contain and ratify it, it wouldn't be that useful anymore.
--
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
Um that was "one million times faster". Therefore, your post is wrong by a factor of 50,000.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
it's still 20gb of removeable media!
entertainment has ALWAYS been the reason for innovation in the electronics market. TV? Radio? for computers: grfx cards? audio? heck, the need for more speed (cpu, ram,..) is from the demands of newer games. Cdrom drives were pushed by games (namely myst). Storage has always been about media. As far as the consumer market goes, entertainment is the thing.
Sure, 20Gs is great, but isn't that kinda small? A docking station and an 80G drive are cheaper. The size of a PDA? Sorry...too large for anything that's truly portable. Get my employer to put one of these in every machine so I can take transport MP3 collection between home and work, or from workstation to workstation? OMG...that would just make my IT guy's day. The only thing I can think of that this would be useful for is classified (TS) workstations. Easy to pop out of the machines and lock up each night at relatively moderate cost.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
There's been a lot of mention of using removable drive bays and standard HDDs, But I thought using standard HDDs in a car is not an easy task. HDDs don't seem to survive prolonged exposure to vibration and intermittent G shock, and while spinning at 7200 rpms. Heat is also a problem where I live, my car bakes in the sun most of the day, it was 110F today, and much hotter inside the car.
I see no mention of any of these specifications on iomega's site. Maybe they're hiding it?.
If these devices do hold up to vibration, shock, and heat I'm all for them and don't mind paying extra for 20GBs.
Are there other ways of getting 20GBs or more in a car cheaply and reliably? I'd be interested in your insight.
Will it suffer from the click of death? Will it have nonstandard device drivers? Will it be released on FireWire and USB only?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I got zip's, I got jaz, I got compact flash, I got CD-R and CD-RW... the last thing that I need is yet another way of storing all of my "research papers" on yet another format that may or may not be around for more than a year or two...
:)
then again, one can store a lot of "research" on a 20 gig disk
Your quote has a typo in it, and it should really be a part of your .sig so people like me can choose not to see it.
If you go to their web site, and click on the BUY NOW link you will see they have the following packages for sale USB w/ 10G disk Firewire w/ 10G disk Firewire w/ 20G disk Note there is no mention of a USB 2.0 version yet. Also, they are "Out of Stock" on all of these items ....
Are you paranoid if you know that they just want to know everything you say and do?
If I were to make a competitor to this device, I would buy a 20 Gig hard drive and make some fancy plastic external removable drive bay. The first thing I thought of when I saw this was "Hmmm... Hard drives are cheap. I wonder if Iomega is exploiting this fact".
I'm sorry, but with the a removable drive bay costing just $7.50 and a 20 gig drive near a $100 or less, I'm not seeing the Iomega offering as a solution that I want to buy into.
Besides I'm very reluctant to give more money to Iomega. Iomega got off the hook on the class action suit against them for making defective Zip drives (ie the click of death). The terms being "in order to collect your damages you must buy more stuff from us" which I question as punishment to the company and a settlement for my time, data lost and cost to replace the defective hardware.
And it wasn't just Zip disk/drive that were an issue. We were told that Jazz drives were the solution for1 gig removable storage. But that drive and media also had problems.
I predict that whatever Iomega is planning/making will continue to be very costly compared to the cost of DVD-R media, portable drives, or other media types not yet invented.
Iomega has a long history of never significantly lowering their prices for removable media. If they still sold 10MB Bernoulli cartridges, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see they still cost $200.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
It's compatible with any/all IDE systems.
Two Steps two obtain:
1. Buy removable drive bay
2. Buy 20GB hard drive
Instant Portability! Satisfaction Guarenteed!
Perhaps in non-metropolitan areas high speed access is not available, but the primary use of these devices is not to share data with the world but with co-workers and colleagues. You can set up a LAN that transfers at much faster speeds that allowed by this new device.
At 20 Gigs, you are essentially toting around your entire hard drive (well, maybe yours *heh heh heh*). It isn't bootable, so there's no point in using it as a portable working environment. If you were really interested in sharing, a couple of wireless network cards and laptops would be much more versatile than lugging these Iomega disks around.
Dancin Santa
How often do you find yourself transferring 20Gb of data? Seriously. I don't doubt that people transfer large chunks of data, but we are talking 30 CDs worth of data here.
This product is overkill for the niche it seeks to fill, if only because that niche doesn't exist at the capacities they are targetting.
Dancin Santa
Sounds like a good application of this technology in that case. What was he using before Iomega came out with the device?
Dancin Santa
These are the sounds of the last gasps for life from this company. They create technologies that so quickly becomes outdated as a result of the huge improvements in standard data storage.
Zip? Dead. 100/200 Mbs just doesn't cut it now that you can transfer your data over the Net.
Jaz? Dead. 1/2 Gbs in a portable format? The primary places where this amount of data is being moved is within companies. In that space, it's a simple matter of sharing out a drive and transferring the 1/2 Gigs over the ethernet.
Clik? Dead. Done in my Smart Media and Compact Flash.
20 Gig portable storage? DOA. Wireless ethernet and larger hard drives already exist and can be adapted to any environment that Iomega can imagine for lower cost.
In the storage industry, you can't expect to build something once and rest on your laurels. The name of the game is evolution and Iomega has some serious genetic defects.
Dancin Santa
Iomega products are good when you don't use them...they don't cut it is a heavy-use environment.
Soon, we will have recordabe DVD standard at around the same price we have CD-R. Great storage medium, and I'll still use tape to back up data.
So Real Soon Now, I can get an incompatible 20 gig drive, that is almost as fast, nearly as small and more expensive than the one Archos has been selling for months? Why, I only have to buy three disks at $200 a pop, and I'm saving money!
Wow! how can anyone pass this up?
Well, they will be available. Sometime soon. Really. If you can get one, at least.
And of a pile of useless ZIP disks. All of them COD.
I lost more than 1G of data (10 disks died a slow, Click,click,click!, painful, Click,click,click!, death).
I will never ever buy, promote, use , receive as a gift, donate, use as a paperweight any products from this company.
Click,click,click!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
My bad for sending it from a PDA.
It seems more and more hardware is being devloped to satsify the needs of Pron, Warez and Mp3 mongers. I'm reminded of a Simpsons sequence.... Homer... So, what have you been doing with your self. Nerd... I've been working on a new system that lets you download pron twenty times faster. Marge... Do you realy need that much pron. Homer... mmmmmmmmm. Porn. So the only question is, where can I get one. You know, for um, database storage & stuff.
Just get portable FireWire or USB drives. You don't have the hassle of using a "sleeve", you won't be tied to a single vendor for your next drive, and it will be more compatible.
I can use my rebate coupon from the class action suit to buy a drive that will destroy an entire year of data instead of a week's worth. Click....Click....Click....
"Get them before they get....
"Yay! more portable drives that are totally incompatible with everything else including all other Iomega drives! Yay!"
Not many removable media companies who develop their own storage solutions give away their work to other companies. If Iomega introduces an innovation to the market, it has every right to keep it. It's called a patent, people. We at slashdot always prefer open standards and technologies, but please remember that companies like Iomega do not violate god-given rights simply because they manufacture proprietary technology.
This new Iomega POS is just useless. I'm sorry, but it doesn't do anything useful that someone hasn't already done, and for less money.
To begin with, Iomega has a very bad track record with their proprietary media being short-lived, hence the "click of death" syndrome. If they couldn't design durable 100MB drives and media, why would anyone trust them with 20GB of data?
Not to mention that Sony's 10GB tape drives have been available for years, costing less for the drive and *a lot less* for the media--last time I noticed, about $30 for 10GB, but it may have gone down considerably since then. Are they parfect? No. Would I trust them more than an Iomega product? Yes. Especially with the price differential.
And then there are portable external Firewire and USB hard drives, which are cheaper and probably last longer, although I've heard some people complain about poor drivers.
But what we really need--and I mean *badly*--is high capacity optical storage. A high quality optical disk will last 50 or 100 years if taken care of, whereas any magnetic storage isn't going to have that longevity. I'm not talking about cheap optical storage like bargain-basement brands of CD-R, but a quality medium. That way we could be assured of safe data storage and retrieval.
As it is, I have GBs of data that won't fit comfortably on CD-Rs and which I wish I could back up to something more reliable than a second hard drive--but I can't. No big optical disks. That's why DVD-R is going to be such a boon when it's finally available at a competitive rate--it won't hold 20GBs, but that data could be backed up to a couple or a few DVD-Rs and most likely be safer there than anywhere else except on magneto-optical storage, which is too small capacity and too expensive.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Webster's defines "peerless" as "unequaled; having no peer or equal". I can think of several probable peers for this device in terms of price per megabyte: second hard drive, cd-rws, dvd writeables, etc. Of course, this is based on the assumption that Peerless is in the $100-$200 range, with cartridges in the $50 range. I base those assumptions on what I've seen of other cartridge-based gigabyte+ systems, so they could be way off.
I mentioned a second hard drive because, in my opinion, it's the best backup option available. IDE drives aren't proprietary, are relatively cheap (around $100 for a 15 gig machine at circuit city), and are stable. As for portability - is it that hard to just open your case and yank out the slave drive? Admittedly, I wouldn't want to do this every few hours, but how often do you have to Sneakernet multi-gigabyte files? Don't say that in corporate environments with huge databases, this might be needed - the corporations with huge databases have high-speed networks to shuttle the things around with.
CD-RWs cost only a buck each at compgeeks.com - even with their lower capacity, I bet I could store 10 gigs for less that what Iomega will want for their cartridge. In addition, CDs are shiny, and I personally like shiny things.
I'm the stranger...posting to
In the beginning there were hard drives, and they were good. But verily, they were inside the computer, and the user was on the outside, and never the twain did meet. And the floppies were too small, and the tape drives did take long and corrupt the sacred data.
And God created the Zip drive and the SparQ, and -lo! - they were both overpriced, and did gougeth the hapless consumer, as God commanded in Microsoft 10:12 "Thou Shalt exploiteth the ignorance of the user, for his soul grows as his pocketbook shrinketh".
And the consumers did buy the Zip, but not the SparQ, though it was thre mightier drive. And Iomega grew fat on their success, and did make more and bigger drives.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of overpriced external drives, I shall buy none, for the best form of backup is simply a second hard drive.
I'm the stranger...posting to
If you don't have firewire on your computer yet, what kind of a nerd are you?
Check out some firewire hard drives from VST.
The prices are a bit higher than the iomega drive, but they will come down.
Daniel
Onstream already sells 30 and 50 gigabyte solutions. And the disks are much cheaper.
View site here
I think everyone would be better off with an IDE drive and removable drive bay. You might not be able to drop it but most of us won't be seeing if our harddrives can walk down stairs, alone or in pairs.