The Rev is Iomega's latest attempt to recapture the glory days of the highly successful Zip drive. The concept is simple. Take a fairly ordinary 2.5in hard disk, remove the heads and place them inside an external USB drive.

The result is a unit that operates much like the Zip or Jaz, in that the stripped-down hard disks (cartridges) can be bought separately for around £44 each and used as removable media.

Special credit must be given to Iomega for overcoming the problems associated with removable hard disks. Dust particles can easily become jammed between the head and platter (disk) sections, as the space between the two is very small. Iomega gets around this problem by using a special locking mechanism, generating internal airflow and using filters to capture loose particles.

Installation and setup is fairly painless thanks to the Rev's USB connectivity. The device allows you to read disks without any special configuration, but you'll have to install drivers before you can write data.

The Rev's performance is on a par with external hard disks. We backed up 4GB of data in around four minutes. Unfortunately, the claimed maximum 90GB capacity with compression for each cartridge is a little optimistic. Mpeg movie files, for example, already have a high rate of compression, so don't expect Rev cartridges to store much more than 35GB.

Whether the Rev is suitable for your needs depends very much on how you plan to use it. If all you require is a single backup device, a standard USB hard drive can offer more storage for less money. If you have several PCs and need to store backups to several discrete volumes, the Rev could be the ideal solution.

Contact: Iomega
www.iomega-europe.com

Specificaions:

• USB2
• 35GB native capacity per removable disk
• 90GB compression with included software
• Media data transfer rates of 12.7 to 25.4Mbytes/sec (buffer to/from media)
• 13ms average seek
• Drive letter access
• Bootability
• 30-year shelf life for disk (estimated)
• 400,000-hour MTBF (estimated)