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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."

21 of 58 comments (clear)

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

    The real Iomega product was the Bernoulli Box!

    1. 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).

    2. 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.
    3. 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.

    4. 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)
    5. 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!
    6. 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!

    7. 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.
    8. 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.'"
    9. 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. 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: 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.

    2. 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.

  4. 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.
  5. Re: Short term thinking by tburke261 · · Score: 2

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

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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?