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Lenovo To Drop Iomega Brand On Joint EMC Products

Posted by timothy on from the what's-in-a-name dept.

FrankPoole writes "The Iomega brand name will soon be officially laid to rest. Lenovo and EMC, which jointly own the storage company, will replace the Iomega name on all NAS products with 'LenovoEMC.' Lenovo and EMC entered into a joint venture last year, with Lenovo buying partial ownership of Iomega. But because the company name is associated with cheap, consumer storage and ZIP drives, Lenovo is giving Iomega the boot."

58 comments

  1. Forget ZIP drives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The real Iomega product was the Bernoulli Box!

    1. Re:Forget ZIP drives by alta · · Score: 1

      wow, those things actually came out in 1983!

      And worse, I remember them!

      --
      Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
    2. Re:Forget ZIP drives by RJFerret · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yes, which actually used the Bernoulli Principle to "fly" the heads over the disk surface--150 MB floppy disks essentially! Far more novel than the successive Zip or Jaz drives, convenient/valuable though they also were (I still have one of the latter).

    3. Re:Forget ZIP drives by Nethead · · Score: 2

      I had to recover a file from one just the other week. First had to find a computer that actually had a printer port. Then I had to hold the ZipDisk just at the right angle for it to read.

      --
      -- I have a private email server in my basement.
    4. Re:Forget ZIP drives by Darinbob · · Score: 2

      I loved the zip drives. They were essentially fit the same nice as today's thumb drives in a lot of ways; a big chunk of storage space and much faster than tape or cd burners. The real drawback was that it was proprietary and thus not portable.

    5. Re:Forget ZIP drives by EkriirkE · · Score: 1

      The real drawback was that it was proprietary and thus not portable.

      But they were pretty much ubiquitous ca.1999

      --
      from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
      to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
    6. Re:Forget ZIP drives by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Not that ubiquitous. Places where I worked (those that had pcs instead of workstations) wouldn't have that many of them, or they'd have one mobile that you could take for making a backup.

    7. Re:Forget ZIP drives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Funny, I opened the access door on our old laser cutting machine the other day and sure enough, there was a zip drive staring back.
      First one i've seen in years. The same laser is still happily running Windows NT 4 Workstation as well.

    8. Re:Forget ZIP drives by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Those were great. My first Linux system ran off of one (a 150MB) cart, booting off the SCSI interface on the Sound Blaster 16. At the time I'd spent $700 of paper route/lawn mowing money on the 330MB EIDE hard drive, and the 150MB carts were in the $75 range, so it was a great deal. I think the drive was $199. I had a cart for Slackware, a cart for booting the Mac at work with a decent System, and one for media storage. Eventually affordable hard drives started coming in GB numbers, but none of that gear ever failed before it became obsolete. Wish I could say the same about their later products...

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    9. Re:Forget ZIP drives by crankyspice · · Score: 1

      I just got served with Requests for Production that read, in part, "Electronic Media devices may include, but are not limited to, computer memories, hard disks, diskettes and cartridges, network drives, network memory storage, archived tapes and cartridges, backup tapes, floppy disks, CD-ROM, removable media such as Bernoulli Boxes and their equivalent, magnetic tapes of all types, microfiche, punched cards, and any other vehicle used for digital data storage and/or transmittal."

      --
      geek. lawyer.
    10. Re:Forget ZIP drives by davester666 · · Score: 2

      I believe that angle is called "parallel". As in, parallel to the slot in the ZipDrive.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    11. Re:Forget ZIP drives by rvw · · Score: 2

      I believe that angle is called "parallel". As in, parallel to the slot in the ZipDrive.

      As opposed to serial, where it eats like the cookie monster!

    12. Re:Forget ZIP drives by alta · · Score: 2

      The first one I used was not a very good experience. We went to the store and purchased a parallel port zip drive. We opened the documentation and read the instructions how to set up the parallel port zip drive. We spent too much time on trying to make it work. Then I noticed the little dial on the back with numbers 5-6 on it.

      Turns out they had boxed a scsi zip drive in a parallel port box. Since they were both 25pin everything connected just fine.
      http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT31D8g6cmJ8YdtuJL6FmYBkrnEr3HoOs9cYmTuFwAen70T0DQr

      --
      Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
    13. Re:Forget ZIP drives by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      The real drawback was that it was proprietary and thus not portable.

      There was a zip drive everywhere you needed one but you might or might not be able to find a Syquest drive. I had a 44 MB syquest back in the Amiga days, but I didn't try to swap them with anyone. Just used it to have multiple different boots. My controller had SCSI and MFM and you couldn't boot from MFM, so it was my boot volume. Then later I got a SQ135 and it was positively speedy :)

      After zip, unfortunately, is when the UHD floppy was introduced, AKA LS120. 120MB and zip-like access speeds, plus it was a double- or even quadruple-speed floppy drive. Because it came so late, it never caught on. I have one in my PC just in case I need to read a floppy. It's IDE, so it doesn't cause the same fail that accessing a floppy bus can...

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    14. Re:Forget ZIP drives by Nethead · · Score: 2

      Us old-timers still sometimes call it a Centronics port.

      --
      -- I have a private email server in my basement.
  2. Today I learned Iomega by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    still existed as a name.

    1. Re:Today I learned Iomega by nametaken · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I didn't know Lenovo owned them. This reminds me a bit of the Cisco+Linksys pairing. Putting a respectable name on a budget line of products doesn't seem to help, it just makes you less sure of anything with the respectable name.

  3. C'mon, /. I'm ashamed to have on my screen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    these days... can't even get the correct URL? c'mon!

    http://www.crn.com/news/storage/240154127/lenovo-to-drop-iomega-brand-on-joint-emc-products.htm

  4. Do you know what this Means? by ExploHD · · Score: 5, Funny

    Looks like the Iomega brand has experienced the click of death.

    1. Re:Do you know what this Means? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They should have dropped the name long ago. I won't touch Iomega anything since that fiasco.

    2. Re:Do you know what this Means? by laffer1 · · Score: 1

      I'd rather see them experience the BSOD. The NT4 driver was terrible for their parallel zip drives.

      --
      MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
    3. Re:Do you know what this Means? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I pretty much despised zip disks, I'm not sure what the deal was, but they were always getting corrupted. And they weren't particularly cheap at the time either.

      OTOH, my zip CD was actually pretty reliable as a CD burner.

    4. Re:Do you know what this Means? by tchdab1 · · Score: 1

      I'm afraid of what this means: IBM will be selling "LenovoEMC Legacy Removable Storage Modules" soon.

    5. Re:Do you know what this Means? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It was amazing they were able to spin up. Their actual failure rate was *grotesque* under quite typical loads with those Bernoulli drives. The Zip drives were handy for a while, but soon replaced in my world by having real network connections to real servers.

      I'm afraid that any company that company ever hoped to make was eaten up on the expensive replacements of failed hardware.

    6. Re:Do you know what this Means? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think you mean 84Y3225 Modular Storage, Removable, LENOVO EMC

    7. Re:Do you know what this Means? by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      I pretty much despised zip disks, I'm not sure what the deal was, but they were always getting corrupted. And they weren't particularly cheap at the time either.

      The Zip drives were handy for a while, but soon replaced in my world by having real network connections to real servers.

      The thing is, back in the 90s, files were getting big enough that they weren't fitting on a reasonable number of floppy disks. And CD burners were rare (with CD-R's costing dollars each and buffer underruns ruining $5 worth of discs). So the Zip disks were a reasonably economical and common way of transporting large files.

      They continued a bit until the late 90s when CD burners became pricey but common accessories with discs heading south of $1 each, with CD-RWs becoming commonplace. They were dead by the 2000s because everyone moved to CDs.

      These days, large files are transported over home networks and WiFi, Ethernet and DVD burners are ubiquitous..

    8. Re:Do you know what this Means? by cyber-vandal · · Score: 2

      You missed out USB thumbdrives which are the de facto replacement for floppies.

    9. Re:Do you know what this Means? by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      You missed out USB thumbdrives which are the de facto replacement for floppies.

      True, though back in the 90s, USB was unheard of, and whatever flash storage was available, was impractically expensive compared to zip disks (when you pay $200 for 32MB...).

      It's why one of the more popular digital cameras at the time was the Sony Mavica, because it stored images on floppy drives. Pay $200 for 32MB, or $10 for a box of 10 disks. And with USB being a rarity and slow, card readers were equally difficult and espensive and even slower (parallel/serial ports were common).

  5. First Kris Kross and Now the Jaz Drive by Maltheus · · Score: 1

    Pretty soon, it'll be like the 90s never happened.

    1. Re:First Kris Kross and Now the Jaz Drive by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Pretty soon, it'll be like the 90s never happened.

      I wouldn't mind, except for Tool and Rage Against the Machine...

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:First Kris Kross and Now the Jaz Drive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pretty soon, it'll be like the 90s never happened.

      I wouldn't mind, except for Tool and Rage Against the Machine...

      Better copy them off of your Jaz drive and upload them to bittorrent ASAP.

  6. Short term thinking by Zak3056 · · Score: 1

    Sounds like short term thinking to me--EMC makes some short term cash, but now their brand is associated with low end NAS devices instead (or at least in addition to) top tier back end storage? This sounds like when Cisco bought Linksys, and rebranded some of the products, with rather predictable results. What idiot wants a low end product associated with a premium brand name?

    --
    What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
    1. Re: Short term thinking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't know about you, but I had no issues with Linksys devices until Cisco bought them. They were decently priced, reliable, and had working Linux drivers. After Cisco, things changed. I remember when I upgraded my home network to 802.11n to replace my Linksys 802.11b router. It would take 5 minutes for every setting change. Some of them required the damn thing reboot after each change. I looked online to find out I wasn't alone. Maybe I should have done more research but I returned that thing the same day.

    2. Re: Short term thinking by tburke261 · · Score: 2

      It was all downhill at Linksys after the WRT54GL, IMO.

    3. Re:Short term thinking by rahvin112 · · Score: 1

      Lenovo, who gets to destroy EMC's brand name and reap the profit of doing so. Duh.

      Now if you are asking why EMC would agree to that it's usually some MBA that just saw the bonus he'd get for signing up for some guaranteed revenue from Lenovo. On the other hand in 6months when EMC takes the PR disaster that's inevitable they will be fuming mad.

    4. Re: Short term thinking by Carewolf · · Score: 1

      Of course they did. Cisco sells overpriced crap, when they bought Linksys the cheap Linksys products were often better than 10x more expensive Cisco products. The prediction everybody made after the purchase was that Cisco had to intentionally make Linksys more crap, and they did.

    5. Re: Short term thinking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      how is that different than EMC / Iomega? EMC sells overprices crap and ... oh wait, iomega is just crap, whereas linksys had decent products.

  7. Seems reasonable by frovingslosh · · Score: 2

    I don't know why they ever bought into the name in the first place. I never had any of the drives that exhibited the dreaded "click of death", but once I was foolish enough to buy a CD-RW drive made by someone else but in an Iomega box. It had problems from day 1. I later learned that the manufacturer had firmware updates for their version that fixed the problems, but even years later there were never firmware fixes offered for the Iomega version of the drive. First and last thing with the Iomega name on it that I'll ever buy.

    --
    I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
    1. Re:Seems reasonable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't know why they ever bought into the name in the first place. I never had any of the drives that exhibited the dreaded "click of death", but once I was foolish enough to buy a CD-RW drive made by someone else but in an Iomega box. It had problems from day 1. I later learned that the manufacturer had firmware updates for their version that fixed the problems, but even years later there were never firmware fixes offered for the Iomega version of the drive. First and last thing with the Iomega name on it that I'll ever buy.

      Um... so... wait, I got lost somewhere in there. Are you saying you didn't ever use a Zip Drive and are talking out of your ass in the first bolded part, or that you're using overconfident and demonstrably false terms to try to impress us with your disdain for Iomega, meaning you're still talking out of your ass in the second bolded part?

    2. Re:Seems reasonable by cyberfunkr · · Score: 1

      I don't know why they ever bought into the name in the first place. I never had any of the drives that exhibited the dreaded "click of death", but once I was foolish enough to buy a CD-RW drive made by someone else but in an Iomega box. It had problems from day 1. I later learned that the manufacturer had firmware updates for their version that fixed the problems, but even years later there were never firmware fixes offered for the Iomega version of the drive. First and last thing with the Iomega name on it that I'll ever buy.

      Um... so... wait, I got lost somewhere in there. Are you saying you didn't ever use a Zip Drive and are talking out of your ass in the first bolded part, or that you're using overconfident and demonstrably false terms to try to impress us with your disdain for Iomega, meaning you're still talking out of your ass in the second bolded part?

      I say the whole thing is BS. Let's break this down...

      I never had any of the drives that exhibited the dreaded "click of death" - implies that he's owned more than one zip/jaz drive.
      but once I was foolish enough to buy a CD-RW drive made by someone else but in an Iomega box - so he got a Mitsubishi or other OEM drive that happened to have an Iomega face plate? In that case he should be bitching about the OEM manufacturer. Or does he really mean just the "box", as in, it's a TEAC drive, but the cardboard box said Iomega and you said, "Seems legit"? In which case, you should really be bitching about TEAC.
      I later learned that the manufacturer had firmware updates for their version - So there was a fix for the hardware
      but even years later there were never firmware fixes offered for the Iomega version - But since the "box" said Iomega, he waited until Iomega said go. Unknown if he tried the drivers of "someone else".
      First and last thing with the Iomega name on it that I'll ever buy. - Because the box it comes in is all that matters.

      Nope... doesn't add up.

      Personally, I've owned and used the parallel version of zip and it worked great on both Mac and PC. Installed a few IDE versions of the zip and they worked like a charm too. Recently had to fire up a system with the internal zip, and out of 10 disks I tried reading, only one failed to be read. And it's possible that that disk was a left over Mac format.

      I miss the old zip disks but they didn't scale, weren't as portable, and cost more than the up-and-coming USB flash disks.

  8. Trademark by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Great, maybe I can use the Iomega brand for the storage units that are built into my Duesenberg brand automobiles. Oh, wait, what? These are Eternal Trademarks?

  9. Lenovo vs Iomega reputation by braddeicide · · Score: 2

    And Lenovo makes cheap consumer pcs. Iomega zips were hard as rocks, I respect that brand more than Lenovo.

    1. Re:Lenovo vs Iomega reputation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If by "hard as rocks" you mean temperamental as hell, then I agree completely.

      Slow, cheap (quality), low-capacity and very prone to the dreaded click of death. I remember them with the opposite of deep fondness. Now Avatar's Shark 250 drives, on the other hand...

  10. Sounds familiar... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    But because the company name is associated with cheap, consumer storage and ZIP drives, Lenovo is giving Iomega the boot.

    Just take a look at the Lenovo laptop lines of late...."consumer" and "cheap" are becoming their focus point.

  11. Good riddance... by mapuche · · Score: 2

    I owned several Iomega products, and they had the worst product life cycle. Some of its driver's products never survived one OS upgrade.

    The problem isn't their products were cheap, they simply didn't care about the consumer. At one point customers had to stop buying their stuff.

    1. Re:Good riddance... by CaptainOfSpray · · Score: 1

      I agree. I had an Iomega tape drive for backups. When it stopped working (after one use per month for a couple of years) , it turned out that the little widget inside that sensed the presence of a cartridge and opened the cartiidge's access door, was a little 2-cent piece of plastic that was (a) well-known for failing (b) not replaceable. More fool me, I bought a Jaz drive as replacement, and had all the problems associated with it. After that, I too refused to buy Iomega products and warned others away from them.

      --
      "Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
  12. Huh? by intellitech · · Score: 1

    Driver issue or a hardware issue? I always remember my ZIP hardware being solid as a rock.

    --
    vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
    1. Re:Huh? by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      Driver issue or a hardware issue? I always remember my ZIP hardware being solid as a rock.

      Never had a problem with Zip (never used one enough, perhaps), but the Jaz drives were like single-use disposable. The cartridges outlived the drives.

      Fortunately at the time the group I was working with was so profitable that no one cared. We used them to ship gigabyte-sized databases and tossed them as fast as they broke. Abandoned them when we got mainframe-to-mainframe FTP services, though.

  13. I never understood why Iomega was so popular. by Vidar+Leathershod · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It always struck me that Zip drives became so ubiquitous. I looked at them briefly for my own use, and chose the Syquest EZ135 instead. The Syquest had a transfer rate 4 times the speed of the Zip drive, and the access time was half that of Zip. About the same cost for drive and cartridges, but 35MB more data per cartridge. Considering my internal drive was a 40MB SCSI drive, that was something. I swear that sometimes the Syquest felt faster than my internal SCSI drive, though I never benchmarked it.

    They always mounted, unlike Zips which sometimes had seating difficulties. Later, when Jaz came out, for the same price you could get the Syjet. A faster drive and 50% more storage. Not as reliable as EZ135, but then again, JAZ was a reliability disaster. Oh, well.

    --
    The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
    1. Re:I never understood why Iomega was so popular. by colfer · · Score: 2

      Iomega was competitive at pricing a notch below Syquest and getting stuff to market early, probably before it was ready. They were the new kids on the block, well-capitalized from Utah, competing with California and Northeastern companies, as I recall it. (Aggressive marketing, just look at how they co-opted the "zip" name from common usage.) One of several episodes from the Computer Shopper era when customers were just relentless on shopping by price & spec, to the detriment of quality. I think the Syquest cartridges were $70 and the Zip disks $25 (though smaller) at one point, or some such stuff in the trade press that made Syquest look just a bit over the line. In other words, I almost bought a Syquest! When Zip disks became the standard, you had to have one to exchange data anyway. I have a box of those blue drives somewhere, parallel port, SCSI, internal.

      CD writers were pretty iffy back then too. I have a stack of CD's that only work in the HP drive that made them. So many useless coasters were made at 1x and 2x speeds on Windows systems that they got that name, coasters. Close all other programs before proceeding! Buffer underrun! Or was it overrun?

    2. Re:I never understood why Iomega was so popular. by Dadoo · · Score: 1

      It always struck me that Zip drives became so ubiquitous.

      I'm guessing they just happened to be in the right place, at the right time - right between floppy disks and recordable CDs. I never bought a ZIP drive, myself, because to me, it was clear they wouldn't be around for long. Ironically, they didn't even really outlast the floppies they were designed to replace.

      I always thought it was too bad Fujitsu wasn't better at marketing. For twice the price, their 3-1/2" MO drives could generally hold 3 times as much. They were fast and reliable, too. My Dynamo 640 still works, after about 15 years.

      --
      Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
    3. Re:I never understood why Iomega was so popular. by Svartalf · · Score: 1

      It was underruns- and I tended to rarely have them...but then, I wasn't using Windows back then for those sorts of tasks. :-D

      --
      I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
    4. Re:I never understood why Iomega was so popular. by Vidar+Leathershod · · Score: 1

      Maybe the old style Syquests were that much, but the EZ135 debuted at $25. A screaming deal at the time.

      --
      The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
  14. Jaz lives on, even if it shouldn't by RubberDogBone · · Score: 1

    Worked on a DR project this week with a MAJOR consulting company. Everything was going peachy until they let drop that a major part of the DR process involved restoring data they kept on a Jaz drive.

    This is not some old leftover process step, either. We've done this DR thing with them for years and this is the first year they have mentioned a Jaz drive. An awful lot of things ended up relying upon this Jaz drive.

    I kept the horror to myself.

    --
    Sig for hire.
  15. Lenovo is cheap too by lazyBob · · Score: 1

    Isn't the Lenovo company name associated with cheap PC & notebook?

  16. EMC Brand is Worse! by Slashdot+Parent · · Score: 1

    I associate the EMC brand with "shitty, expensive storage that crashes all the time", but maybe that's just me and my personal experience.

    --
    They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
    1. Re:EMC Brand is Worse! by RevDisk · · Score: 1

      Eh, pretty much, but they're popular. Overall, I'm not overly impressed with SANs in general for their price.