Iomega Zips Into Network Storage

Remember the Zip drive? Back in the days when everybody used floppy disks for backup, the Zip drive offered about 100x the capacity in a removable cartridge. With hard drive storage now typically in the hundreds of MB, we've moved on from floppies and even the larger Zips. But Iomega, the company that pioneered this technology, has continued to innovate new products. Now they're not just on the desktop, but in the server room as well.

Iomega is now a part of EMC, a Fortune 500 corporation that provides enterprise storage solutions to other Fortune 500 companies. But Iomega is still focused on individual and small office users, with some products designed for small to medium size businesses. If you need hundreds of terabytes to a petabyte of storage, you should probably stick with the  EMC Symmetrix DMX series. But if your needs are in the hundreds of gigabytes to a terabyte of storage, Iomega may have your most cost effective solution.

The Prestige Desktop is Iomega's basic desktop external hard drive. It comes in 500 GB and 1 TB capacities and uses USB 2.0 connectivity to your PC or Mac. If you don't need even this much storage, there are lower capacity, and lower cost, desktop drives available. But if you want more, consider a double drive. It has two hard drives in a single case that appear as a single volume to your computer. Storage capacity goes up to 1.5 TB.

For something more stylish, the eGo line of external drives come in jet black, midnight blue and ruby red colors. All are USB 2.0 with 1 TB drives inside.

There are a couple of products designed for Macintosh support. The MiniMax desktop hard drive looks like a doppelganger of Apple's Mac Mini computer. It comes in 500 GB and 750 GB versions with USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 connectivity. The UltraMax is available in a sleek case that also looks very Mac-like. It has eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 connectivity options. eSATA will give you transfer rates up to 3 Gigabits/sec.

The UltraMax double expands the UltraMax capability with two drives and RAID 0 and RAID 1 capability. RAID is used for higher performance. RAID 1 is selected for data security. It also comes with EMC Retrospect software for full-system disaster recovery and ease of data backups. The UltraMax Pro Desktop hard drive offers 1.5 TB of storage with your choice of RAID 0, RAID 1 or non-RAID configurations. Drives can be hot swapped for easy replacement.

One of these drives could work well with your system. Have a look at the Desktop Hard Drives by Iomega

Iomega has also moved on from mere desktop storage products and now offers network storage with capacities from 360 GB up to 3 GB. Most of these use Gigabit Ethernet connections to your network.

The StorCenter Pro 150 is designed specifically for small office networks. It supports Supports SMB/CIFS (Windows), AFP (Macintosh), NFS, and FTP Network Protocols. There are 4 hot-swappable SATA drives inside. They can be set up for RAID protection if desired. Other StorCenter configurations offer built-in print servers.

For larger operations, StorCenter Pro move into a rack configuration with storage configurations of 1, 2, 3 and 4 TB. Gigabit Ethernet connectivity is standard for this NAS (Network Attached Storage).

Interested in getting into network attached storage for your office? Check out Iomega's Network storage made easy.

Oh, yes, one more thing. You can still get ZIP drives and media from Iomega.