Thoughts on IOMEGA REV as location backup solution

[Ziggy Uszkurat]

Hi folks,

I just came across the IOMEGA REV drive and I'm wondering about its suitability as a location backup solution. The drive itself is around £350 (approx $700) and can store 70GB on a removable disk - just right for the REDRAM! It's USB2 and it has a quoted transfer speed of up to 30MB/s. The disks are projected to have a 30 year shelf life and cost around £45 (approx $90) each. All in all, it's comparable with other tape solutions - but will it be rugged enough? Thoughts anyone?

Ziggx

[TimothyD]

Grass Valley are using this, in combination with compact flash on their Infinity camera. So I'm sure it is a decent solution.

Tim

[Jeff Kilgroe]

REVs are pretty rugged. They're a magnetic hard disk platter inside a plastic shell. Much more robust than a hard drive as all the moving parts (heads, motor) are located in the drive unit.

The problem with REV discs are the high cost per GB and the relatively small capacity compared to actual hard drives or tape media. If CF cards and other common forms of FLASH hit 32GB within the next several months, REV disks will be pretty much obsolete.

[dalemccready]

heh, I imagine Iomega are getting a bit sick of that process...

develop drive, get drive to market, buzz ensues, cheaper/larger/more robust alternative turns up, Iomega back to drawing board. Rinse, repeat.

[Ziggy Uszkurat]

The Grass Valley drive looks like it is much more robust than the standard IOMEGA offering. It's a great shame it only holds 35MB though. If they could utilize the 70MB disks then I think it would be a very good solution for on-site backups of the REDRAM. As a matter of interest, does anyone know if you could simply tar or bzip the data from the REDRAM and compress it further? What I want is a robust archiving medium that roughly equates to one REDRAM.

Best Wishes
Ziggx

[Jeff Kilgroe]

You could lump data off the RED RAM or RED Drive or whatever into a zip file... I don't know if any further compression will really be possible though.

[Rob Lohman]

I don't know if any further compression will really be possible though.

Not with something like zip

[Graeme Nattress]

You'll get no further compression as the files are already pretty much close to their full information content.

Graeme

[Joe Carney]

Hopfully in the near future, Blu-Ray data disks at 100gig apiece will be available and affordable.

[Michael Hastings]

Hopfully in the near future, Blu-Ray data disks at 100gig apiece will be available and affordable.

How reliable will they be over the long haul - they told us CD-roms were forever and then we found out they degraded rather quickly.