Iomega Rev Drives - 35GB Cartridge

I've search the the forum with little success and need some feedback.

I am contemplating the purchase of an Iomega Rev drive with 35GB cartridge storage disks. Does anyone have any experience with this product. Pro and Con.

I like the idea of breaking out my mass storage into smaller chunks, but not so small as CD and DVD. Ideally if one disk fails, you minimize your losses. Another advantage is that I intend to store these in a vault/safe and with the Rev disks I can save space.

The reviews online that I have read have lots of pros, but very few cons. Want to know what real users think about this product.

Much appreciated.

--gmaize

I'm sorry but my IMHO, what the point speding so much money if you can get larger capacity external HD and it much faster and bigger?????

Removable disks are easy to transport and are good for offsite storage. If they were cheaper i'd get one. After a while you can't keep everything on your hard drives, or you just don't want to, because it makes backups take a long time. I figure I shoot around 50GB/year, more once I start doing more commercial stuff.

I'd agree with the external hard drive solution. They have been coming lower and lower in price.

Of course when I think Iomega the phrase "Click of Death" always comes to mind.

I certainly wouldn't trust Iomega. They have a far from pristine reputation as far as reliability goes. Their solution was always deny... deny... deny...

Iomega used to be in the fore front, now they are just around. I see their dirve on clearance all the time, and I still will not buy one because the capacity is too low. Good luck.

I agree. 35GB is too low. It is absolutely feasible to use ordinary hard discs as your sole storage. The solution would depend on your computer and how much you want to spend. At a minimum you could use a couple of external USB 2.0 or FireWire drives and write your backups to them. USB 2.0 is very fast. Better still is to have redundant storage on your computer as well, e.g. mirrored drives or RAID 5 (requires 3 discs or more).

It appears from the responses so far that:

1. Iomega still has a reputation and reliability problem.
2. Cost of cartriges exceeds other mass storage options.

I don't take your recommedations of standard external hard disk drives lightly (and I appreciate the viewpoint), but my intentions are to use the cartriges to minimize the number of CD/DVD/Zip/Other type disks I will be storing in a fire safe. It's simply a space saving alternative and one where I can retrieve the data from the media more quickly and with better reliability. Realize that fire safe data boxes have very limited space available (+/- 1 cu. ft.) and these units would still have to be placed in a theft secure safe/vault. I see it very similar to tape backup, but with improved speed and hopefully longevity in the media.

Perhaps I should consider just buying small external hard drives, filling them up and storing those in the fire safe. Is this what I'm hearing from you all.

Responses appreciated.

--gmaize

You could not pay me to use a removable HD again!

While the concept sounds great, you have to open the drive cassette to dust to allow it to be inserted and written to.

For many years the SyQuest removable drive was the standard of the graphics industry. I lost years of work at one time to a head crashes on SyQuest drives.
They admitted that they could not seal a removable drive again dust, and that was a killer.

At that time, Iomega's removable drive was called the Jazz drive. They sold many thousands of them and then problems arose, and it has also been dead for years.

gmaize, if you must have something bigger that dual layer DVD, do yourself a favor and get a Seagate, Maxtor other brand name portable, enclosed HD. It will fit in your safe just as easily as a cassette.

I would bet a lot of money that this Iomega drive will not be around in two years.

It would be more efficient than writing lots of DVDs, especially when one copy for backup isn't sufficient. It should also be reasonably cost-effective. Don't think I'd buy small capacity drives though as they'd only be a short term solution. Get the biggest size before the cost per GB goes up steeply. Currently that's around 200 or 250GB.

As for a fire safe - I've read that magnetic tapes can be ruined because the inside of most fire safes gets hot. The magnetic data is lost. Hard discs should be better, but you'd want to do some research. More important would be having your backups in one or more different physical locations.

If you've got cheap fast Internet access you could always use an on-line storage provider for your backups.

External Hard drives come in different shapes and sizes. The standard is probably a powered external drive containing a normal desktop computer hard drive. However, you can also get USB powered drives that contain laptop size harddrives. Sure, these are more expensive on a per gigabyte basis, but they are easy to store due to their diminuative size, and they definitely beat something like the Rev.

Pinto, lancea and Citizensmith;

Thanks for being so blunt. I'm really glad I turned to you all for your thoughts with respect to the Rev drive. There is not a single positive response in this thread.....that speaks volumes to me. I'll take a new direction and do my research for small dimension external hard drives and also consider the economics on a dollar per gigabyte basis (hadn't thought about it like that until now).

Lancea, I too have heard that I need to be concerned about data storage media in fire safes. Yes they may not burn, but internal temperatures do get to a point where media can melt +/- 130 degrees. The recommendation that has been given to me is to use a small fire safe data box (about 12" X 14" in size), into which you put your drive or other disks and that this box then gets put in the safe. Yes, it an extra step, but necessary with most commercially available medium to large security safes. These safes can protect paper, jewelry and other valuables, but additional protection is needed with computer media.

Thanks all for your input. I can't thank you all enough.

--gmaize

Glad we've helped. If you have a swimming pool, one way to resolve the heat problem would be to keep the discs in a waterproof box ...

If the purpose is archival, consider this, too.

No one really uses any of the old technologies any more. Syquest, Jaz, Zip, 120 floppies...
Stick with formats that are not likely to change.

Excellent point. But what in your opinion would these technologies be? Harddisk appears to be the choice according to those who have responded to this thread. What others does anyone, including yourself recommend?

--gmaize