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Iomega Plans 20GB Portable Drives 192

Posted by timothy from the wanna-buy-a-betamax? dept.
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!"
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Iomega Plans 20GB Portable Drives More

Iomega Plans 20GB Portable Drives

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  • I bought a 1G Jaz drive to back up my valuable data. Wrote backups, checked them, they worked, everything was fine. First time I actually needed them, which happened to be a few weeks after the warranty on the drive expired, the data was gone. I should have had another copy for backup, you say; but that was the backup! Months of work down the drain. Nothing that I can't live without, but a lot of stuff I wanted to keep and can never replace. (Including all my old GW-BASIC games from when I was learning to program.)

    Upon visiting the Iomega Web site I discovered they were in the middle of a Valentine's Day promotion. "Tell us," they said, "your love story about our products!" The trouble with love stories is that they don't always end happily...

    I did eventually find a tech support email address. I wrote a long, detailed, and polite message explaining my problem and the steps I had taken to attempt to fix it (the description above is drastically abbreviated, although accurate as far as it goes). I received a form letter inviting me to call a 1-900 number and pay $29.95 on my credit card for technical support on my Zip [sic] drive.

    Because of this experience I do not intend to ever buy, nor recommend to my clients, any Iomega product again.

  • Re:Who are they kidding? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Not to mention the reason that most people buy portable drives these days...to send off files to business associates, clients, prepress, or what have you.

    Here's the problem: My company buys 30 Zip 100 disks every two to three months, we put ads on them and mail them out. They never come back (even though we ask nicely), so we have to eat that $300 every three months. We're starting to send out more on CD-R, which is more trouble but only about $1 ea.

    Iomega must be smoking some serious crack if they think that businesses are going to buy 10 to 20 of these little drives at $200 a pop, and send them out, never to be seen again. If I'm going to send out a 20 Gig hard drive, I'm going to send it out in a big external case so that somebody knows they need to return it.

  • Ummmm.....Let's see (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Today I bought an external 80GB Maxtor Firewire drive for $350. You know, one of those armor plated go anywhere things. Chain'em together and create a data center on your desk (or in your car connected to your laptop). Give me a break. This new Iomega piece of crap is rediculous. It doesn't even qualify as too little too late, more like "remember that last idiotic product Iomega came out with right before they went out of business".

  • Even better prices are available! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    FireWire PCI Card $24 [newegg.com]

    FireWire PC Card $30 [macsales.com]

    80 GB FireWire Hard Drive $325 [thenerds.net]

    I'm not sure why anyone is defending Iomega on this.

  • Re:Click of death? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It refers to Jaz and Zip drives [grc.com] and media which failed with the endless sound of a 'Click, Click, Click....' as the drive head tried to read data from the disk (but failed) over and over again. Iomega denied it till the bitter end until they lost the class action lawsuit against them [slashdot.org] last month on this issue. Even then I don't think they admitted fault (their product was defective). But the ultimate insult - and this is why so many people hate them - is that for restitution they were able to get the courts to allow a remedy whereby in order to get a refund from Iomega for their defective product - get this - you have to buy more Iomega products! That's right, the refund in the class action is in the form of a rebate only valid on future Iomega purchases. It's kind of the last straw for a lot of people around here. They really don't sell price competitive products (never have except for a few short months at the outset of each the Jaz and Zip). They seem very good at marketing. But people just don't like a company that doesn't take its customers seriously. So most people are avoiding these products [slashdot.org] like the plague. As you can see Iomega is trying to artificially raise demand for their "peerless" product by not having it be available when they announce its availability. There are too many alternatives out there [slashdot.org] for much less (or with much more storage).

  • Re:Liars make baby jesus cry... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24, 2001 @11:17AM (#200333)
    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.
  • If the smaller Zipdrives have Click of Death, what would you call it when these die? Thud of Death, Thunk of death, Clunk of Death... ?
  • This space intentionally left blank.

    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.
  • 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.
  • This is Iomega we're talking about. It will be incompatible with disks written by the very same drive! :)


    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

  • Um, the poster was infact talking about FIREWIRE drives. These drives are just a $60 PCI card away from being compatable with just about any PC still running.

    Alternately, you could just yank out the innards and put a newer, more compatable chassis around the disk itself.

    As hardware manufacturers start to address the external bus standards that are now finally available on PCs, the value of overly proprietary solutions from the likes of Iomega quickly tend towards zero.
  • Here's a CLUE:

    How many iterations of anti-virus software is out there?

    How many brands?

    How often do you think they have to update it?

    If you're needing anti-virus protection, why use a specialized program that protects just that peerless drive (and needs updating, just like the others) when you can get one that protects everything including the boot sector of all types of bootable drives?

    Your reasoning is flawed from the get-go.
  • 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...
  • Well, that, and they fired their CEO [cnet.com] a couple days ago. That's usually a tipoff.
  • Actually I've read a couple of reports now that these new drives are pretty fragile and have a shitty trasfer rate (ie, 1 hour to move a 1Gig of data)

  • no, he's talking about Jaz drives also... (Score:3)

    by gmezero ( 4448 ) on Thursday May 24, 2001 @12:17PM (#200344) Homepage
    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.
  • I sent my faulty drive back to the dealer to be repaired/replaced. Never had any problems with the drive that came back, though of course I couldn't read my Zip disks for the 6 weeks or so that it took.
  • What's the click of death? I've heard the term used in this discussion, and I've never heard it before.
  • The PhatNoise car mp3 player has used this system for a while to get a hard drive into a car player. The only hard part is getting your hands on a box from the beta release.
    www.phatnoise.com [phatnoise.com]
  • 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."

  • Don't Forget the Castlewood ORB (Score:3)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Thursday May 24, 2001 @01:10PM (#200350) Homepage Journal

    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 [castlewood.com]?

    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


  • To begin with, I will state right now that I am an employee of Iomega, though I have nothing to with hardware. It's great to see that no one on this site ever bothers to read up on anything, and just posts whatever excrement happens to pop into their heads as fast as possible.
    I'm just pissed off that there really are so many morons that post here.

    Now, that's out of the way, and you all hate me...

    The peerless drive has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with Jaz (non)-technology. It is nothing at all like the Jaz, and suffers from NONE of the limitations of the Jaz. It's faster, it's FAR more reliable, and best of all it's SEALED MEDIA.
    It also has nothing to do with Zip technology.
    Or click.
    Or any other 10-year old glorified floppy or unsealed hard drive tech. This shit is brand-new.

    Yes, I agree the price is pretty sick.. but what do you expect? Where are all the other portable solutions that fill the gap the Peerless meets? 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. I'd really like to see you hook a portable usb hard drive up to something like a portable mp3 player, and expect it to stay powered on for more than a few minutes. Get real, please.

    I also have to question the grip on reality some people have. This is not a shiny, happy world, and companies are FOR SURE neither shiny, nor happy. I want to know what other company, in the same position as iomega, would have done anything differently in light of their own click of death? I seriously doubt ANY of them would admit to anything.

    If you knew how much hardware you all had in your machines that had firmware full of holes, you would be sick. Try getting the manufacturers to admit to it.. and good luck.

    None of you have to buy this thing, and at that price I don't blame you. But I really wish SOMEONE would take the time to fucking read about something before shooting off at the mouth.
  • 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?

  • so? (Score:1)

    by weasel ( 8923 )

    Iomega is a has-been. Get a portable Firewire drive.
  • Well, looks like my thoughts are echoed by a number of users here. I used Magnetic-Optical equipment from Iomega before they decided to become a mass retailer and was happy with the performance. With the introduction of the Jazz drives I purchased a number of units. All in all I have been disappointed with the quality of these units, not to mention the price.

    Iomega was interested in gouging customers rather than making a dependable product. Costs were in my opinion excessive, plus their need to deliver a product to lock in users was complete BS.

    As far as I am concerned Iomega burned their bridges with me and I will never purchase equipment from them again.

    Lando
  • Which is especially apt considering the amount of pr0n one can fit in 20GB. Maybe Iomega could make that part of its marketing campaign...
  • Exactly. How portable is this thing if you're the only guy in the world with one?

    That and that fact that 20GB of storage that isn't part of a RAID array or has various backup procedures surrounding it just scares me .. What happens if your shiny new IOMEGA wotsit (disk or unit) goes and dies, leaving you shafted for recovering your data. Ugh.

    PS: Sig quote is 'You ever dance with the devil by the pale moonlight?' (I always ask that of all my prey) :)

    --
    Delphis
  • Let's say that you have a computer, and that I have a hard drive. The hard drive has a computer, but no data. It does, unfortunately, have a compuvirus. When I insert my hard drive, the compuvirus takes over your computer.

    What? .. If the drive can be written to, it will be 'taken over' in much the same way as a regular hard disk would be. If you introduce virus killing software then yes, it would kill the virus in BOTH cases.

    Don't be silly.

    --
    Delphis
  • Care to send that Z250 to me then? I've been using Z100's for a couple of years now and had no problems whatsoever. Yeah, I know about the "click of death", but apparently that doesn't effect everything they've done, since I ain't never had it myself.
  • another drive bay for $9:

    http://www.1stclasstech.com/remhardrivmo.html [1stclasstech.com]
    ---

  • Re:Hrm (Score:1)

    by ndege ( 12658 )
    look at the internals of the HDD...so a single flake of the electromagnetic coating flakes off and floates around inside the drive.....within a few days, or a few years, that flake WILL get between the heads and more of the coating, flaking off more coating, etc. Even after severe drop/shock to a drive, you might not notice anything for some time...I won't consider a drive that has been dropped to be in good shape...I will not use it for any critical data unless it is to be inserted into a RAID5 array. (Even then I make a note on the case of the drive what happened.)

    Just my perspective in life...

    ---

  • "Peerless"? (Score:5)

    by Black Perl ( 12686 ) on Thursday May 24, 2001 @11:16AM (#200361)
    "Peerless"? What's with that name?

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

  • With almost every other type of removable storage (DVD excluded) it was incompatible with everything that was on the market previously.

    Punch cards didn't work in cassette tape drives. Cassettes didn't work in 5.25" floppy drives. 5.25" floppies didn't fit in 3.5" drives. 3.5" floppies didn't fit into CD rom drives.

    So what? This isn't something that Iomega invented, it's the way that things work.

    If you don't think it's a good idea, don't buy it and it'll die like the LS-120 has pretty much done.

    LK
  • Out of stock? Yes...

    "The company said it has a backlog of about 25,000 units. It will begin to ship drives this week to those who ordered early, and the models will hit retail store shelves in late June."

    pulled from this article [yahoo.com].

  • If you care about performance and you bought a drive that hooks up to a parallel port, then the problem is with your sense of judgement, not IOMega's ability to build drives.

    With my 10 year old Amiga and a SCSI Zip drive, such a transfer takes less than a minute and uses less than 10% CPU. If such performance figures are important to you, then you should upgrade your pentium system to something of at least 1980s technology.


    ---

  • 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.)


    ---
  • ... Iomega will go bankrupt faster than you can say "Pink Slip". I've half a dozen of defective JAZ media, which have read errors in any drive I've tested with. However the drive is simply too stupid to mark the sectors as defect when formatting.

    CD-R/CD-RW are much cheaper anyway, and have similar data rates except for writing

  • 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!)
  • The big difference is that the sieve is reliable.
  • 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.

  • Yes, AMD did purposely make their new CPU incompatible with all the other CPUs out on the Market. That way once you buy this new solution from AMD you are forced to buy more of them from AMD if you want to expand AND STILL REMAIN COMPATIBLE.

    Why do I bother?

  • Liars make baby jesus cry... (Score:3)

    by FatSean ( 18753 ) on Thursday May 24, 2001 @11:00AM (#200371) Homepage Journal
    Check out http://www.iomega.com/peerless/features.html and scroll down to the "compatible interfaces".

    Sorry son, you lose this one.

  • God, Michael is such a tool! (Score:5)

    by FatSean ( 18753 ) on Thursday May 24, 2001 @10:47AM (#200372) Homepage Journal
    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?

  • Re:Why this sucks, why Iomega must die. (Score:3)

    by reaper20 ( 23396 ) on Thursday May 24, 2001 @10:51AM (#200373) Homepage
    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 ....
  • If you work with MANY multimedia files, large movies etc, burning cd's don't make sense. Hard drive space is "cheap", but swapping hard drives isn't fun either.

    At least now, you can create a divx/dvd, put it on a disc and reuse it. well, at least a small dvd :)

    ---
  • I fail to see how installing a new, blank hard drive makes you vulnerable to computer viruses. I've been sitting here for five minutes trying to come up with a scenario where a virus infection occurs from installing hardware that requires no software to run as it is all in the BIOS. I can't think of a single case where something like that would occur. Perhaps you should check some facts before posting something that you obviously know very little about.
  • 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.
  • "*Not recommended for use with systems running AMD based chipsets"

    Oh, well...
  • Actually, it's:

    H"ave you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?"

    But anyway...

  • A quick search on Google [google.com] reveals several places that sell laptop hard drive to desktop IDE interface converters - usually around $15. Someone please explain to me why I would spend a few hundred dollars for a proprietary (-sp?) solution, or spend that same money (or a little less) on a much smaller laptop hard drive with a desktop converter. Maybe someone even makes hot-swap bays for them?

  • As cool as huge storage for MP3s is, I hope manufacturers don't continue to ignore the analog parts of their MP3 players. Most portable players have sound that just sucks. The Intel Pocket Concert [intel.com] is the only exception I've ever heard, and even it could use some improvement.

    The point is, MP3s can sound really nice when you use a good DAC and headphone amplifier [headphone.com]. Even highly integrated versions of these components can add a few bucks to a player -- but why not offer customers an option to step up the sound quality of all their MP3s, no matter what the bitrate?

    -David.
  • Right on!

    Junky digital camera lenses are precisely analogous to MP3 player analog circuits. Nice insight.

    -David.
  • The 95% CPU utilization is due to Windows parallel port driver not being written properly. I saw the same thing on OS/2 years ago.

    Then as a test -- one of the first things that I did when examining Linux four years ago -- I set up Linux with my parallel port Zip drive. I used X as a rudamentary "extra load" while copying to and from the Zip drive. I saw no visible slowdown.

    Granted, Iomega wrote the Zip PPA driver, but there may have been only so much they could do with what they had to work with (Windows parallel port driver)
  • As I said, this was four years ago and one of my first experiences with my own UNIX-like installation. Yes, I am aware of uptime and ps (and top) now. I wasn't then.

    Starting X on a system is CPU and disk intensive. Doing it in addition to a file process over a parallel port is aptly referred to as a "rudimentary extra load." I wasn't looking for exact timing. I was checking the oh-so-subjective "does it act slower" benchmark; I was eyeballing it with a wristwatch.

    The fact remains, unlike DOS/Win or OS/2, Linux did not stutter, wince, or otherwise bog the system down when making a large file transfer with an Iomega parallel port Zip drive.

    I know how you feel about the lameness filter. I triggered the lameness filter while posting a C++ code sample. What is slashdot coming to indeed.

    Note: It's generally a good idea to benchmark items on working samples -- how long it takes you to get done what you would normally want to do. uptime, ps and top would not necessarily be a better indicator in this case.

    And on a completely different note, I had a drive that clicked, but after a while, the clicking stopped and the drive functions fine to this day. Go figure.

  • Instant Portability! Satisfaction Guarenteed!

    So if I'm not satisfied, what do I get in return? Personally, I think I'd like some rebate coupons [iomega.com] for some reliable products [grc.com].

    < tofuhead >
    --

  • $90 for a 2.5" USB-ide drive case, $150 for a 20Gig laptop drive. For $250 for the carrier, get a Neo 25 MP3 player which also acts as a USB drive ;)
  • I'd be all for a drive like this as long as it ends up being cheaper per-gigabyte than a conventional hard-drive.

    Even CDs are getting pretty close on a $/MB scale now, assuming around $1.50 for a CD and jewel case.
    - WrexSoul
    \/.
    vvv
  • 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.

  • Good Lord (Score:3)

    by Illserve ( 56215 ) on Thursday May 24, 2001 @11:00AM (#200390)
    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.

  • dude (Score:5)

    by fizban ( 58094 ) <fizban@umich.edu> on Thursday May 24, 2001 @11:28AM (#200391) Homepage
    As michael exults: "Yay! more portable drives that are totally incompatible with everything else including all other Iomega drives! Yay!"

    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.

    --

  • only portable storage formats that have ever taken off are ones that are either open or easily licensable.

    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...

  • Well, just as Zip250 drives can read Zip100 disks, this drive would have to read at least one of the previous Iomega disks. That would be compatible.


    ---
  • The biggest problem I can see with this is: what if you drop that hard drive a foot or two? I know newer (better) HDDs can survive some impact, but at the same time, I've seen people who won't set their HDD down on anything unless there's a rubber mousepad underneath to pad...Regardless, I doubt very much if many HDDs would survive a 3-foot (or more) fall to carpet/tile/cement/whatever. I'm sure some of us have been lucky, but do it a few more times and your drive is hosed.

    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.

    ---

  • 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).

  • So we have a drive jacket thingy the size of a large PDA, and drive cartridges that go into it. Why did they even bother to do this? Seems like it would make more sense to just mass-produce a single standard brick that has a hard drive inside, and a 1394 (Firewire) interface.

    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

  • 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.
  • I paid less than $160 for my new 45GB IDE HD. Iomega wants $160 simply for their 10GB media. To get 40GB, you will need a drive: $250 and 2*$200 disks, totalling $650. With a discount, perhaps $600. Not a good deal to me.

    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.
  • (RANT)I was just looking for a corporation to buy a device mass storage device from. I think I'll buy this with my $15 rebate check from my ZIP drive that just clicks, and clicks. Yup i'll trust them agian, especually after they handeled the click problem so fast and completly. I am compleatly satisfied with 15 bucks. now how much do I need to pay to get my 15 bucks back? then i'll have another paper weight to go with the 10 other drive iomega makes.


    ________

  • Rip-off! (Score:3)

    by shepd ( 155729 ) <slashdot@org.gmail@com> on Thursday May 24, 2001 @10:55AM (#200448) Homepage Journal
    "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. :-/
  • There is going to be a lag on the obsolesence because of the lag in people getting high speed acess. In the cities high speed access is relatively common, but go further out, and you are back to zip drives, etc. for transfering large files. This is still a substantial bit of change, even if it is not something you find useful right now.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • The typical use in this case is taking art work down to the service bureau for professional printing, things like over sized posters.

    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 [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • I am not sure.

    For all I know it was a bournoulli drive, or something like that.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • And it saves money. Think about it, I can go out to Bestbuy and get a 30gig ide harddrive for $130. Why spend $200 on a 20 gig drive when in a removable bay I can put 40 gig drive for less than the 20 gig. I know when I take my ide drive somewhere the computer I want to use it on has to have a removable drive bay, but even if it doesn't have one, but has an IDE controller it only takes maybe 5 minutes to slap the bad boy in and off we go. This drive pricing scheme just doesn't make sense to me.

    You every dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?

  • 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 Pricewatch [pricewatch.com]is $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&

  • 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.
  • The main advantages to Iomega's new idea are (a) the drive is physically sealed, containing its own read/write heads and thus preventing contamination; (b) you can drop it some thirty feet without damaging it, and (c) you can connect it via USB, FireWire, or SCSI, making it compatible with just about any computer you own and (if Iomega has their way) several non-PC machines you might get in the future.

    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
  • 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;
  • Will it suffer from the click of death? Will it have nonstandard device drivers? Will it be released on FireWire and USB only?
  • IOMEGA has a proven market penetration strategy. Their methodology works identically to the strategy used by msot manufacturers of InkJet Printers. Sell the device at or below cost, thereby developing a potentially infinate revenue stream associated with the sales of the proprietary (or licensed and oursourced) ink cartriges or media (depending which product we're talking about). I really can't find fault with this strategy, as much as I'd like to. It's good business. And the product itself is reasonably useful too. It's not like they're unloading poor quality products on the market. Let the buyer beware though. Do the math before you get one

    --CTH

    PS: the first fault people will find with this posting is that they feel the IPMEGA drives are over-priced. It's not that they're over-priced. It's simply that they aren't price-optimized with regard to internal componant quality/price and so fourth. The company could increase their profit margin and reach a larger customer base by making such optimizations, but it's a testiment to the popularity of their products (and the fact that they filll a critical market niche) that the company isn't motivated to do this.


    --

  • I'm not giving them more of my money. (Score:3)

    by xFoz ( 231025 ) on Thursday May 24, 2001 @11:17AM (#200485)

    I'm sorry, but with the a removable drive bay [compgeeks.com] 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.
  • Do you really want to get committed to a removable storage solution brought to you by the company that still charges $15 for a disk that holds 100MB and $100 for one that holds 1GB?

    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.

  • 20 GB Portable Drive (Score:5)

    by Calle Ballz ( 238584 ) on Thursday May 24, 2001 @10:54AM (#200489) Homepage
    It's compatible with any/all IDE systems.

    Two Steps two obtain:

    1. Buy removable drive bay [vikingcomputers.net]

    2. Buy 20GB hard drive [pricewatch.com]

    Instant Portability! Satisfaction Guarenteed!
  • Yes, I agree the price is pretty sick.. but what do you expect? Where are all the other portable solutions that fill the gap the Peerless meets?

    Well Archos [archos.com] 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.

  • 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
  • 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

    Well, for one thing, these new drives require a proprietary adapter to connect to your computer. This adapter doesn't seem to be compatible with any other drives. Say what you will about compatibility with older media, but the connection to the computer shouldn't be proprietary and newfangled-- not at this stage in the game.

    In any case, Michael's got a good point. It doesn't matter how right you are about the technical aspects. If the drive requires you to switch all of your media and turns out to be a significant pain in the ass for consumers, it'll die a flaming, hellish death-- regardless of whether it's fair or not.

  • I still can't figure out why the LS-120 has failed to take off

    1. Marketing. For example, the customer that told me we had to get a zip drive so they could mail us disks probably never heard of the LS-120. (Of course, now we just use CD-R and almost any computer can read the disks.

    2. That compatibility comes at a price. A have had problems now and then the 1.44 meg floppies because the case is so thin it flexes more than it should and apparently the drive heads can't find the tracks. I've also had instances where the drive itself would flex too much when you bolted it in. By abandoning the standard form factors, Iomega could put massive cases on the disk and the drive, so they will never flex. The LS-120 is as thin and not-quite-rigid as the 1.44's, so unless they have compensated for this somehow, I wouldn't expect high reliability.

    3. By now, the time for super-floppies has come and gone. The drives are only a little cheaper than CD-R/RW drives, the disks are a lot more expensive, and with CD-R I can create a disk that you don't need a special drive to read.
  • How are they supposed to be compatible with previous drives??? IDE. SCSI. Or if you want to look forward instead of backwards, Firewire or USB 2.0. The article is lacking in technical details, but my best guess is that they just repackaged IDE with a custom connector, just so anyone foolish enough to buy one is locked in.

  • Pron, Warez and Mp3s. Oh my. (Score:5)

    by Kujako ( 313468 ) on Thursday May 24, 2001 @10:48AM (#200504)
    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.
  • This is some sort of bizarre marketing gimmick, designed to tie you to IOmega. It makes little technical or financial sense.

    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.

  • How are they supposed to be compatible with previous drives???

    Easy--dispense with the proprietary dock and go with a FireWire connector on the disk: it's smaller and it's more compatible. If they want to sell universal connectivity, they can sell USB-to-FireWire and SCSI-to-FireWire adapters with that.

  • Click....Click....Click (Score:5)

    by Quizme2000 ( 323961 ) on Thursday May 24, 2001 @10:50AM (#200509) Homepage Journal
    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....
  • Not only that, but when 100GB IDE drives are cheap and plentiful, you can ditch the 20GB and plug in 100GB.
    -----------------------
  • 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.

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