The Hindu : Business : You can `drive' away with this REV-olutionary disk

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 20, 2004

Business

Business

You can `drive' away with this REV-olutionary disk

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, APRIL 19. Iomega Corporation, a well-known name for data storage, has unveiled new cross-over technology: a data drive that looks and works like a fixed hard disk, but uses storage media that can be removed and carried away in one's pocket.

In an Indian launch, simultaneous with its global release, the San Diego, California (U.S.) company has introduced the REV drive, as an alternative to traditional tape-based back-up and archival systems. While transitioning to the platter technology used by hard disk drives, the storage is packed in removable media much like cartridges — or the company's own Zip disks. The drive immediately available, takes 35 gigabyte (GB) capacity REV disks — and proprietary software thrown in free, allows up to 90 GB of data to be compressed and squeezed on each disk.

The drive is targeted at small and medium enterprise server back-up needs and in the course of a special technology preview for The Hindu, Sanjeev Gupta, Senior Senior Manager, Business Development for Iomega Pacific, explained that the complementary Automatic Backup Pro software, allows users to `set it and forget it': the system backs up daily or whenever there is a change, compressing and encrypting at the same time. Unlike the "one touch'' type of portable hard disks which are primary meant as PC backups, the REV, a direct successor to the cartridge drive, separates the delicate read-write electronics from the hard disk platter-cum-spindle motor. The latter forms part of the removable media — the size is that of a half-deck of cards. "You can throw it from 30 inches and nothing will happen to your data,'' Mr. Gupta assures. The drive has a sustained transfer rate of 25 MB per second — about 10 times faster than tape drives.

The basic REV drive with a free 35 GB disk costs Rs. 18,900 in the internal version, where it looks much like a 3.5 inch floppy drive, while the external unit that can be plugged into a USB port, costs Rs. 1,000 more. Additional disks are expected to cost around Rs. 2,500 each. This price structure appears to be slightly less than the equivalent in rupees of the international dollar prices.

Iomega's roadmap for the REV drive includes future plans to ramp up the capacity to 280 GB per disk. A late-2004 upgrade will allow users to "boot and run'' their systems from the REV drive in the event that their primary drive fails.

And now, a paper disk?

No jokes! Japanese companies Sony and printing giant Toppan used today's Optical Data Storage Conference in Monterey, California, to announce success in creating a high capacity "Blu-ray'' optical disk whose main component is paper.

The one-tenth of a millimetre-thick recording layer of the 25-gigabyte disk sits on top of a substrate ten times as thick, made of a mixture of paper and plastic. While the process needs to be tuned for volume production, it is expected to facilitate better quality printing on the disk, easier destruction of sensitive data — and reduced cost. High density disks of this format use blue laser technology to read and write data, and now cost the equivalent of Rs. 1,500 each in the world market.

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