Iomega REV

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REV is a removable hard drive-based disk storage system from Iomega.

The small removable disks store 35 or 70 gigabytes and are based on hard-drive technology. Like a standard hard drive, the REV system uses a flying head to read and write data to a spinning platter. The removable disks contain the platter, spindle, and motor, while the drive heads and drive controller are contained within the REV drive. Current drives allow for data transfer rates of about 25 megabytes per second.

The REV is available as an external desktop model with FireWire, SCSI or USB 2.0 interfaces, an internal model with SCSI, ATAPI, or SATA interfaces, or an external Server model which features a cartridge autoloader and SCSI interface. Iomega also offers a 320GB Network Attached Storage appliance which features a built-in REV. The drives are compatible with Macintosh, Windows, and Linux operating systems, although some only with particular models or interfaces.

This product, especially the server model, is marketed as a replacement of tape drive technology for enterprise data backup, with claims of higher reliability, greater speed, and random access capability. Although the drive is certainly faster than tape and offers hard-drive like access, the reliability question has yet to be demonstrated conclusively in the marketplace.

The Rev is in many ways a successor to Iomega's Jaz drive, which used a similar removable hard-disk-platter concept. However the Jaz design did not put the drive motor in the cartridge. In some circles, REV drives are referred to as RRD, for "Removable Rigid Disk", because SCSI REV drives identify themselves as "RRD" drives to the host OS.

The drives are formatted with the UDF file system on Windows and Unix/Linux. On Apple systems, they may be formatted as HFS+ or UDF in Mac OS X.

As of late 2006, Iomega sells the external desktop Rev drive for $399 USD with one cartridge, and additional 35GB cartridges for approximately $50 USD each. This puts the cost per megabyte for the cartridges alone significantly higher than conventional fixed-platter hard drives, which commonly sell at less than $0.75 per gigabyte for 200GB or more, and can be used in a RAID for redundancy purposes.