Iomega REV drives hold some storage promise

STORAGE FIRM Iomega was showing off a few new products at a hotel near Comdex this year, two of them jumped out at me. The first of these was the new REV drives.

They are a cross between the second generation Jaz drive and the Peerless units. These disks are most of a hard disk in a cartridge, and when you plug them in, they are about equal in speed to a low end IDE drive. They have more components in the cartridge than a Jaz, but less than a peerless.

The capacity of each cartridge is 35GB, or just under the smallest HD you can buy today. They are ideal for fast backups, or occasionally used files. MP3 collections, videos, and other large media files that you don't want clogging you HD will fit on a REV card or two. The drive itself should come in around the $4-500 mark, and carts coming in at $50 or so. Cheaper and faster than a DDS-4 tape, and also a lot faster.

But wait, there's more. Iomega was showing a bunch of stunningly exciting backup solutions to use with the REV. Please note, I am kidding. Contrary to my statements in an earlier article about geeks liking all sorts of weird tech, no one finds backups exciting, period. They also had a mere 'consumer' app for the tech. Iomega had a PVR with a REV hacked into it. Think about this, a Tivo with unlimited 35GB removable carts. Interested? I think this could be the technology's killer app.

The REV isn't short of technical goodies either. They are IDE drives with all sorts of others, USB2, Firewire and SCSI to follow, and are bootable. I am told this is because they emulate a DVD drive, so windows will boot from them no problem. If you are a developer, you can kiss the pain of hashed boot sectors from test OSes goodbye. There is serious potential here.

Right now, this booting is only for Windows, but fear not, Linux drivers are definitely in the works. While many software companies suffer from advanced cases of recto-cranial syndrome when it comes to Linux drivers, releasing only binary drivers, or playing games, Iomega told me they weren't going to do that. When pressed, they said the drivers would be open sourced, and built with the help of the community. They are looking forward to helping improve the UDF file system when they hit walls with their hardware. This is what open source is supposed to do, manufacturers take note.

Before you wonder what they look like, there was a really well done cut-away case showing all the dust traps, seals, otters, and mechanisms. We took a couple of good pictures of works, and even though the intrepid Rob Squires was there to hold my drink, they all came out blurry. Wonder why :).

One other picture that did come out was the Iomega Micro Mini USB 256MB flash drive. It is really really small. I mean that. It makes my Kanguru drive look like a battle ship anchor by comparison. µ