Iomega Ships Backup Drive To Replace Tape

Iomega on Monday shipped its REV drive, a new removable drive/disk system it's pitching to both businesses and consumers as a faster alternative to tape backup.

The REV drive, said Iomega, combines tape's ease-of-removability with a hard drive's performance and ease of use. REV disks transfer data up to eight times faster than tape, and can be rewritten more than a million times.

The REV drive features a maximum sustained transfer rate of 25 megabytes per second (MB/sec), while the removable disks are smaller than a deck of playing cards. Each disk can hold 35GB of uncompressed data or 90GB of compressed data.

The drive comes with software that automates backups of specified files, keeps multiple backup sets on different destination drives, and performs scheduled backups. The Iomega Automatic Backup Pro applications also includes 2.6:1 compression and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) file encryption.

The new hardware supports Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, and Windows 2000 Server/Professional/Advanced Server.Currently under evaluation by PC original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), REV is available now from Iomega in both external (USB 2.0) and internal (ATAPI) models at prices of $399.99 and $379.99, respectively. REV disks are sold as singles for $59.99 or in four-packs for $199.95.

Iomega also said it would introduce REV-based autoloaders, as well as FireWire-, SCSI-, and Serial ATA-based individual drives in the second half of 2004.