Iomega Releases a New FireWire Drive

by Robin Liss
Published on Aug 12, 2001 12:00 AM



Iomega, a company long known for producing removable storage devices and media such as Zip disks and Jazz disks has come out with a new FireWire hard drive that is easily swapable from computer to computer.

The hard drive system will have two parts, a reader and disks. This will make the system to function somewhat like a computer disk or cd, while still providing the space and speed of a hard drive. You will be able to purchase many disks with capacities of 10GB or 20GB and put them in the reader. You will also be able to swap them at any time on one computer and between computers.

The reader attaches to a computer via firewire allowing for fast transfer speeds. Iomega is also selling a USB version. Currently iomega is selling the reader bundled with a 10GB disk for $360 and the reader bundled with a 20GB disk for $400. Individually 10GB disks are selling for $160 and the 20GB disks are selling for $200. With such a high price however, it is questionable whether the drives will be able to compete with the much cheaper DVD-R format which offers 9.1 GB of storage.