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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!"
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.
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
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
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.
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
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 so excited about this evolution of the Jaz drive. I think a more appropriate name would be Iomega Jiz.
bp
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.
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!)
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"
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
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.
Actually, it's:
H"ave you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?"
But anyway...
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 >
--
It is still the dark of night.
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.
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.
--
+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?
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.
---
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
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!"
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).
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
And what will it be? Jaz? Zip? Peerless? MemoryStick? PCMCIA? Device Bay?
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.
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.
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
"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
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
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 $168?
C'mon, the form factor can't be worth that much, now, can it? Especially considering it's ``roughly the size of a handheld computer or PDA.''
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
I don't see what's so exciting about having a 20gb zip-drive successor that costs 200$ 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
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
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;
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'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!
Well Archos sell a nifty MP3 player built arround a hard drive that can be had for $250 or thereabouts with discounts that also doubles as a 6Gb USB drive. Not only does it not require the overpriced docking station you can use it to play tunes.
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.
Nope, thing runs for 8 hours on the internal batteries (NiMH) and is smaller than my Palm VII on two dimensions whilst being only slightly thicker.
Now IOM are offering slightly more capacity, but Archos have been out for several months now and I'll wager that a 12Gb disk will not be long coming.
For long term archival storage I just go down to CostCo and plonk a 60Gb drive in my cart, take it home, run a backup then take it offline and store it in the firesafe. Total cost $180, I keep a second in my desk drawer in the office. Vastly cheaper than any tape system and much more reliable.
I cannot imagine any need that I have that the IOM drive solves for me. I use my archos box for really big file transfers and CompactFlash (or the Internet) for the rest.
IBMs 1Gb compact flash drive has enough capacity for any imaginable still photography needs I might have. If they could get the price down low they would also be good enough for my video needs too.
As an exercise I actually tried taking videos with a simulated 2Gb cartridge - I cut a box of 10 DV tapes down to 2 minutes so that I had to keep changing the cartridge. It was not all that bad.
My prefered video solution would still consist of a detached CCD head and optics connected to a hip mounted battery pack and hard drive.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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
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....
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