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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.
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.
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
Iomega is so excited about this evolution of the Jaz drive. I think a more appropriate name would be Iomega Jiz.
bp
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
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.
"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
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.
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!
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.
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....