Talk:Iomega REV

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[edit] UDF

I see the disks use UDF. Why don't they work like normal hard-drives and floppies where you can format them with any filesystem you want? --Slashme 11:51, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

According to Iomega, its because UDF doesn't have any of the arbitrary limitations of the other filesystems. They also work with HFS+ on Macs, so I'd wager you can format them any way you want with the caveat that it won't work with the IOMega backup software. [[1]]. I left mine as UDF. I use smbclient,tar,and gzip for backups. EjayHire 15:04, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

I reformatted my 9 drive cartridges with ext3 under Linux for the journaling support. Plus, one was unusable out of the box until I reformatted it. Needless to say, I don't (and can't) use Iomega's proprietary backup software.

It is possible to format a REV cartridge with another format such a FAT32. There are two problems with this:

1) REV drives identify themselves as peripheral device type 5 or a multimedia device. This is the same device type of most optical devices like DVD-RW. Some operating systems may have difficulty with the combination of peripheral device type 5 and a FAT format.

2) REV drives employ a two dimensional error correction system that requires the host to send data in 64KB aligned chunks to achieve optimal performance. The UDF format used on REV cartridges helps to force 64KB aligned transfers. RedChaos 00:10, 17 July 2006 (UTC)