Iomega Ships 35GB 'Son of Jaz'

Hamster Of Death writes "Iomega has begun selling its 'son of Jaz' removable hard drive, Rev. Pitched as an alternative to tape back-up rigs, Rev provides 35GB of uncompressed storage capacity per 2.5in removable disk. The disk is mounted inside a 1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm cartridge, and yields a 25MBps transfer rate - eight times faster than DDS-4 tape, Iomega claims."

Comments

Not for Home Users?

[l810c]

It seems like Iomega has priced this out of the range of the home user market. $400 for unit + $60(%50 in lots of four/35GB.

I could buy 3 large external hard drives or more for the money. Any of the hard drives from Maxtor, WD etc. are less costly than the media alone.

Re:Not for Home Users?

[LehiNephi]

Iomega has always priced themselves out of the market. It seems they try to follow Apple's example: have a cool product and overcharge for its functionality. I would have bought a zip drive years ago, if it were not for the ridiculous price of zip disks.

My university, on the other hand, bought into ZIP in a big way. There's a 100 or 250MB zip drive on every computer on campus. Now that prices on zip drives and media are falling, the window of opportunity has already closed, and everyone is starting to get USB pen drives or just run an FTP server from home. Now the university is selling surplus zip drives for $5 a pop.

So drop the price by about 50% on the media, and Iomega could see a huge demand. But with a price as high as it is, don't hold your breath.

No mac or Linux support

[adzoox]

There's no Mac or Linux support - Iomega (at one point in time) was HUGE in the Mac Owner's hardware regime (especially at ad agencies)

Since "the click of death fiasco" and the fact that Zip carts never really decreased in price, a lot of Mac users switched to CDRs.

Why doesn't Iomega get the fact that CD drives = everyone has them - Rev drives - NO ONE HAS THEM?

This is like Gateway - Gateway SEEMS to have thought people actually WANTED their flavor of PC - Iomega seems to think people WANT their proprietary standard!

is 35 MB enough.

[Brigadier]

in todays content based world is 35GB enough. I work for a mid sized architecture firm. our back up typically is 60 GB every day on DLT tapes. A DLT tape costs in the range of $40 where as an 40/80 DLT drive is around $600. So I dont really see this being a viable alternative to the existing technology. The other question I have is how well does the disk hold up to abuse. aren't most drive based solutions pretty tempermental when it comes to shock damage ?

Re:Reliability?

[strictnein]

I wouldn't trust my data to this even if it was 100GB/cart.

I fail to see how increased storage would affect your ability to trust your data to a device.

Too small, too expensive, too late.

[klocwerk]

when removable hard drives are so cheap, and enterprise systems are already invested in tape drives, I see no market niche for this.
Plus, 35 gig disks at $60 a pop?
mom and dad aren't going to want to pay $180, plus $400 drive cost, to back up their 120gb hard drive they got in their computer.
good luck iomega.

Iomega is pretty muched doomed.

[minairia]

Iomega is pretty muched doomed. Already at the local computer shops you can by a 1 gig pen drive for 300 bucks. This is way too expensive now, but this time next year the same drive will be 50 bucks and it will be 300 bucks for the 10 gig pen drive, all made by nameless companies in China somewhere.

With a pen drive, you don't need a driver, don't need cables and just connect it to anything running Windows 98 or above with a USB port. (not sure about Linux or Apple). I have a 64mb one I use everywhere all the time, at work, home, at Kinkos. It is the best storage medium I've ever used.

The price to get really decent storage is still too high, but drops exponentially every couple of months.

Even if Iomega sells these drives (they might), there's no way they can compete with the Chinese companies which don't have the huge infrastructure, thousands of employees, marketing costs, etc.

Excuse me for not caring.

[Adrian De Leon]

After six Zip drives, and more than 50 zip disks destroyed by the "Click of Death", excuse me for not trusting Iomega with my data anymore.

What really got me, was the complete disregard Iomega showed to its custumers with the Click of Death incident.

I saw several thousands of dollars worth of Iomega hardware/disks turn to crap thanks to that clicky sound, and that is without counting the data itself or the time spent dealing with recovering said data.

Sorry Iomega, you are not a trusted brand in storage media anymore.

Mod Parent Up!!! (was Re:No way)

[mankey wanker]

It wasn't just how bad the product turned out to be - it was Iomega's failure to support the product. Double Plus Ungood.

a cold day in hell

[frovingslosh]

Someone who disagrees with you clearly would rather mod you down than try to offer any reason why you're wrong, but many people including me strongly agree with this statement

I wasn't a victim of the "click of death" drives, but I did buy a CDRW drive with their name on it. The drive had problems from day one and "technical support: would never acknowledge them. I only found out much later that the drive was a repackaged drive from another manufacturer, and that manufacturer had firmware updates out for a long time that fixed their version of the drive (but would not apply to the drive that identified itself as an Iomega drive). Iomega would never bother to supply a firmware update for the version they released or even acknowledge the problem.

In addition to this and tons of other horror stories of support issues, a problem I see with Iomega products is that the media is never cost effective. You could likely buy hard drives with more capacity than you could but just media for this new Iomega junk. And you could buy an IDE removable drive tray for a heck of a lot less than you can buy this drive for, even with several extra trays. If you go with the hard drive tray approach, hard drives for it will keep coming down in price and offer greater capacity; if you go with the Iomega solution the capacity will never increase over the 35 gigs and media will never come down in price.

Sure, there are some people (I even know a couple) who are dumb enough to put a zip drive in a computer that already has a CDRW drive in it and feed the zip drive. But there is simply no good reason to buy this or many other overpriced, underperforming Iomega products.

Re:No way

[hawkbug]

I don't see how anybody with mod points could consider what you said flamebait. You're right - Iomega sucks, badly. I have had 4 or 5 of their products, each one failed horribly after less than a year. I lost lots of data as a result, hell, I even got a check in the mail from them as part of a class action lawsuit. If Iomega was smart, they would change their company name and hope people don't find out.

Re:No way

[Moofie]

My Bernoulli 230 died.
My ZIP drive died.

Twice bitten.

Backups

[MrChuck]

RAID is not a backup (chant it with me)
Its to survive a disk failure.

"Oh crap. This got all messed up. I need to restore $THIS_DIRECTORY to what we had a month ago...

And pull the copy from 6 months ago too, just so I can check it. Thanks, mr admin."

No, if this can be used (USB good) to backup the Very Large Drives of my relatives and friends who Just Don't Know Better, then great.

DVD @ 25GB (the bluelaser one) or multi-layer (50GB) has been promised and we're still waiting.

At least this is here.

So when to I get the 5.25" TB one?