subscribe to our feed.
Iomega® REV™ 35GB/90GB USB 2.0 External Drive
Behold, the Iomega Rev drive. This external hard disk drive is a compelling option to home, small, & mid-sized business users. It is feature-packed, cheap, and compatible with most existing backup suites.
Speed & TCO
Let’s get right to the point. The Rev drive is fast. It can copy at 25 Mb/s. DVD-RW comes in a far second at 5-11 Mb/s. It can copy up to 8 times faster than traditional tapes. If time is of the essence, this is a great advantage.
Home users traditionally haven’t been as interested in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as business users, but i would recommend you look at it. …The Rev drive, on a five-year basis, stacks up pretty nicely against the competition in this arena:
-CD-RW $6,924
-Travan $3,157
-Dat72 $2,206
-DDS-4 $1,856
-DVD-RW $1,202
-Rev $584
Backup & Compatibility
The Rev drive comes with the Iomega Automatic Backup Pro. This is a nifty little tool that works like shadow copy, but to an external drive. As you make changes to selected drive files and folders, the Automatic Backup Pro works in the background to save them. This is great peace of mind to users. Have you ever saved an important document and then had a critical computer malfunction? It’s not fun, especially if it’s business related. That loss of time and productivity translates into lost profits. This software is slick and easy to use.
The Rev drive is now coming with beta software called Boot & Run. This is another neat idea. A major drive malfunction not only causes loss of data, but restoring the computer takes time. And time, as they say, is money. The Boot & Run software allows you to boot from the Rev drive and continue on your merry way. When the new drive arrives, just restore your media and you’re off again. This is added value to this product.
When i originally tested the drive, it came with Norton Ghost. This allowed you to make an image of your system. This comes in handy for folks who test their machines a lot and/or do development. Once the computer becomes unusable, just restore development and the image back to the drive and you’re off and running. I don’t know if the Rev drive currently ships with this software package.
But what if you are already using a backup suite? The Rev drives works with major backup suites, including the ubiquitous Veritas packages. This is not a loss if you are considering switching backup devices/media.
Summary
In all, the Rev drive offers a compelling option for home, small, and mid-sized business users. It is fast, cheap, and easy to use. It offers simple backup schemes and is compatible with pre-existing backup suites. I would recommend this backup option.
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
Recent Comments