Iomega REV

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REV is a removable hard disk storage system from Iomega.

The small removable disks store 35, 70, or 120 gigabytes and are made of 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 320 GB 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.

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.