New Iomega Desktop Hard Drive XL Series Offers Massive 1TB Capacity
By NEWS RELEASE |
December 16th, 2005
Comments (6)
Iomega Corporation, a global leader in data storage celebrating 25 years of business, announce the Iomega® Desktop Hard Drive XL Series, a compact four-drive enclosure with 1 terabyte (TB) of capacity*. Designed for creative services professionals and others who require the fastest editing speeds possible in today’s small office and tech-savvy home office, the Iomega XL Series 1TB drive delivers advanced capacity and performance and includes Dantz® Retrospect™ Express software for a complete data backup and disaster recovery solution.
“Projects like video editing push the limits of today’s storage drives, particularly as the market shifts towards high-definition video, so Iomega created the XL Series to erase the bottleneck that a single drive represents in terms of power and performance,” said Lee Williams, Vice President, Product Generation, Iomega Corporation. “Whether it’s editing and managing digital video, photographs, music or work files, the Iomega XL Series hard drive takes advantage of today’s fastest interfaces and most advanced storage technologies to deliver a uniquely powerful device for the next generation of applications.”
Users of the new 1TB Iomega Desktop Hard Drive XL Series can store up to 18,500 hours of music, 4,000,000 photos, or 1,500 hours of video** on a single Iomega XL series device.
The new Iomega XL Series drive connects to the host PC through one of its three built-in interfaces: FireWire® 800, FireWire 400 or USB 2.0 (backwards compatible with USB 1.1). Measuring a svelte 6.42″ x 7.99″ x 12.52″ (W x H x L), the attractive XL Series enclosure takes up little space on the desktop, yet packs incredible power:
- Four 250GB* SATA drives, each running at 7200 RPM with 8MB cache for high performance;
- Configurable as RAID 0 (striped) for maximum throughput.
“Not everyone needs a terabyte of storage, but an increasing number of today’s digital home computer users and small businesses have put together small networks that are literally running out of space to back up their daily files or work on data-intensive projects,” said Williams. “The XL Series drive gives them an ocean of available space for projects and day-to-day backup, and it also gives them easy disaster recovery through full disk imaging.”
Users who want the maximum performance possible can configure the XL series drive for data striping across four high-capacity SATA disks (RAID 0), providing virtually instant access to data. The new drive also features two pass through FireWire 800 ports and a USB 2.0 expansion port, giving users the flexibility of attaching an additional USB 2.0 hard drive or other peripheral.
Included Software
The new Iomega XL Series drive ships with Dantz Retrospect Express software for data backup and disaster recovery. After an easy setup process, Retrospect Express software offers the choice of incremental backups with multiple revisions, comprehensive backups, and full disk imaging with multiple restore points for quick disaster recovery.
For Windows users, Iomega includes Iomega Automatic Backup Pro software for professional-level backup and disaster recovery for critical data. IAB Pro software effortlessly backs up files on a scheduled or continuous basis. It also gives users professional-level disaster recovery from within Windows, eliminating the need to boot to DOS. Data security is further enhanced with IAB Pro software’s AES file encryption, its ability to back up multiple file revisions, and its easy configuration of scheduled backups if preferred. And with 2.6:1 file compression***, IAB Pro can make each megabyte of storage capacity go further.
Compatibility
The Iomega® Desktop Hard Drive XL Series is compatible with Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional. It is also compatible with Mac OS 10.1 or higher on Mac G3 (blue and white G3 models only), Mac G4 or iMac with built-in USB or FireWire connection.
Price and Availability
The Iomega® Desktop Hard Drive XL Series is now available for $899.95 at www.iomega.com, other select online and Web retailers and through the distribution channel. (Price is U.S. suggested retail).
Iomega Offers A Full Line of HDD Solutions For Holiday Giving
With the addition of the new Iomega XL Series, Iomega now offers a complete portfolio of external hard drive solutions, including economical 80GB to 250GB USB 2.0 hard drives, flexible dual and triple interface hard drives from 160GB to 400GB in capacity, the innovative new Iomega StorCenter Network Hard Drive in 160GB and 250GB capacities, and convenient, portable small form factor hard drives that utilize 1-inch, 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch hard drives in capacities from 4GB to 120GB. For more information, please log on at www.iomega.com.
About Iomega
Iomega Corporation provides easy-to-use, high value storage solutions to help people protect, secure, capture and share their valuable digital information. Iomega’s award-winning storage products include the Iomega® REV™ 35GB drive, available in several computer interface models, as well as a 10-cartridge, one-drive automation product, the REV 1000 Autoloader; Zip® 100MB, 250MB and 750MB drives; high-performance Iomega external hard drives and new HDD solutions such as the Iomega Micro Mini Hard Drive, the Iomega StorCenter™ Network Hard Drive, the Iomega ScreenPlay™ Multimedia Drive and the 1TB Iomega Desktop Hard Drive XL Series; Iomega Mini USB drives, Micro Mini™ USB drives, and the Iomega Mixx™ MP3 player; Iomega external CD-RW drives; Iomega Super DVD drives and the Super DVD QuikTouch™ Video Burner; and Iomega floppy USB-powered drives. Iomega simplifies data protection and sharing at home and in the workplace with Iomega Automatic Backup software, Iomega Sync software and HotBurn® CD-recording software. For networks, Iomega NAS servers offer capacities of 160GB to 1.6TB. For unlimited capacity and anytime, anywhere access, Iomega offers iStorage™ secure online storage. Iomega also offers businesses and consumers a comprehensive data recovery services solution for recovering lost data due to hardware failure, file corruption or media damage. The Company can be reached at 1-888-4-IOMEGA (888-446-6342), or on the Web at www.iomega.com.
* 1TB = 1,000GB; 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes.
** 128Kbps MP3 audio (1.1 min/MB); highly compressed 3-megapixel JPG photos (4 photos/MB); DVD MPEG at 720×480 resolution (11MB/Min.)
*** 2.6:1 data compression assumes the use of “high” compression on Iomega Automatic Backup Pro software with highly compressible files such as typical office spreadsheets and documents. Capacity may vary and is data and software dependent.
December 18th, 2005 at 1:13 pm
With 500GB drives available and 400GB drives approching affordable price points, to call a 1TB device that uses 250GB drives massive is soon going to be an overstatement if it is not already. I realize they will have upgrades to the 400GB drives available soon but as with most NAS developers that produce devices that include drives the price increase for bigger drives does not properly reflect the actual cost of including the bigger drives.
December 20th, 2005 at 12:56 pm
I’m sorry, but Iomega is really missing the boat with this item, with regards to the home storage market. Sure the Firewire 800 is a fast connection, but that means you will need to connect it to either a PC or Server for functionality. Some of the other players (Buffalo Terastation or Infrant ReadyNAS) use standard (or Gigabit) ethernet connections, which means they can be place anywhere there is an open port on your network. Also, they allow other RAID configurations. With the limited RAID 0 configuration, what happens if you lose a drive. Uh, you lose all your data. Therefore, you need some way to backup 1TB. There are no simple/cheap solutions for this in a home environment. The other systems allow RAID 1 or RAID5. Sure you lose some/ a lot of capacity but you don’t lose everything when a drive dies. They should have done much better for $900.
Don
December 20th, 2005 at 1:27 pm
Doh! I should have read the article more carefully as I assumed it was in fact a NAS. OMG! What are they thinking trying to sell a 1TB external drive solution for $900. At Newegg 320GB drives are $125 and external cases can be had for less than $25. That would give you 960GB for half the price of these.
December 21st, 2005 at 12:23 am
I got a little confused on this one too. You guys are right… it’s not networkable, but it does offer RAID 0. Iomega combined the integrated drives into one massive hard drive.
December 21st, 2005 at 9:28 am
The thing is Alexander, you can do the same thing as this unit in any computer with an open PCI slot for ~$600 from Newegg or any online retailer. 4x SATA RAID controll ~$50, external case for 4 drives ~$150 and four 250GB SATA drives ~$400 (4x$100). Plus the thing is formatted with FAT32 file system. This is going to limit you to files >4GB in size. If someone is planning on using this as a media store for HDTV content they will be very dissappointed with that. You can probably reformat to NTFS or something, but should you really have to bother with it. As I said before, Iomega really missed the mark on this one. Heck, I read on the AVS Forums about someone who already a home built 3TB system using hardware RAID. This one… :confused:
December 21st, 2005 at 9:34 am
You’re totally right. The only benefit with FAT32 that I found is that its compatible with Windows/Mac/Linux (note: NTFS is only fully supported in Windows). Of course, the drawback is that your limited to files no larger than 4GB in size. But I agree, there are cheaper solutions if you want to DIY.