Iomega Rev Drives

mercphoto

Anyone use that Iomega Rev drive? Hard drives are convenient and relatively inexpensive, and easy to bulk copy from old drive to new drive. But as has been mentioned, they can fail without warning. CD's seem to have good shelf life but have small size and slow writing. DVD's have questionable life-span, but 4G also isn't a ton of space.

The Rev Drive is 35G per cartridge and claims a 30 year life at roughly 2-3X the price of hard disk. Was wondering if anyone had opinions.

Oh, and that Maxtor drive of mine that I said failed on me in that other thread? I got lucky. I ripped the drive out of Maxtor's enclosure and put it into my own. The drive was fine, my data is fine, its the enclosure that went south. Dodged a bullet...

PeterGar

In all the years I've worked in computer desktop support, I have seen no other brand of hard drive fail as much as Maxtor. I understand it was the drive enclosure that failed on yours, and I've seen plenty of Maxtor drive enclosures fail too. I know the Maxtor external hard drives are affordable and adundant, but I always spend the extra time and money to buy Western Digital drives. In 15 years of computing, I have never had a single Western Digital drive fail, except for the one I dropped off the roof of my car onto asphalt. Ouch!

mercphoto

PeterGar wrote:

In all the years I've worked in computer desktop support, I have seen no other brand of hard drive fail as much as Maxtor.

Good info to have, thanks. So I'm guessing I'm going to be moving that data to a new Western Digital or Seagate in the near future as well!

ChrisJ

Seagate just purchased Maxtor, primarily for the customer base I think.

LuckyBob

I've always found drive reliability an interesting topic; I spent about five years repairing and building machines as part of my job (from home desktops to small HTPCs to rackmount servers) and my personal experience is that everybody's had a bad experience with one drive manufacturer or another, but on the whole they're all about the same.

I checked into StorageReview.com's reliability database (which currently has surveyed a total of 43590 drives) and between Maxtor and Western Digital, WD is more reliable, but only by ~4%. Maxtor's average percentile for all their drives with a meaningful number of reports was just over 40% and WD's was just over 44%. Personally, my file server currently has 3 Maxtor 6x250L0 250GB drives in it (the first one is about four years old now); StorageReview puts that drive in the 24th percentile for reliability but I have yet to have any problems. Same with the even older WD 80GB in the server .

I think people put a bit too much weight into sticking with a drive manufacturer because they're "reliable" from their own personal experiences; every drive will fail eventually and I think people should generally take manufacturer out of the equation and plan for the eventual failure accordingly.

wxwax

Yellow Machine to back up all your hard drives.

1 terabyte of storage for less than a grand.

claudermilk

There's also the Buffalo Terastations and the Infrant units. I'm eyeing an Infrant case & some drives through Newegg. mmmm...TB storage....

Malte

If you're going with tape I'd choose a standard format like DAT instead of a propietary one such as REV. I'm thinking of the day when you have a couple hundred tape and Iomega discontinues REV.

If you're going with a disk cabinet I'd choose one that enables RAID 5. RAID 5 requires 3 disks and the fault tolerance eats one of those in disk space.

Malte

ian408

Just so you know, Western Digital drives are also prone to failure as are IBM
and Seagate. We see failures of each all the time.

mercphoto

More fuel to the fire. I still haven't figured out my long-term strategy, or even how long-term a solution I actually need.

http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/07/18/iomega.rev.70gb.drive/

claudermilk

I settled on my strategy: removable internal drive trays. I have two, one for main expandable storage (one 300GB drive so far) and the other for backups to cycle through (one 250GB so far). Expanding will be the price of the drive plus $14 for a tray. Bonus: they are accessed at full SATA II speed.

SpeshulEd

All drives will fail, most times though the cheap ones that are always on sale will fail before the higher quality drives from any company.

The safest thing to do if you're saving to hard drive, is to have two of them, one mirrors the other. That way, all your data is backed up twice - may seem redudant, but when one fails, you still have your files.

Its also good to make sure the drives are used periodically. They can sometimes fail faster if they're not being used.

As for REV, I'll agree with Malte, stay away from propietary stuff. Five years ago putting photos on a Zip drive might have been a good idea, but now about the only place you can find one is in the garbage. I'd be careful with DAT as well, they're getting harder and harder to find these days.

colourbox

mercphoto wrote:

The Rev Drive is 35G per cartridge and claims a 30 year life at roughly 2-3X the price of hard disk. Was wondering if anyone had opinions.

I've been burned twice by removable storage. Iomega Bernoulli 150MB cartridges and Syquest 1.5GB cartridges. In both cases the cartridges became too small, and the media prices ends up being too high, and then the drives and the media are discontinued, and then you want to move all the data to a new medium anyway, and then you're stuck with an old drive and worthless cartridges. I refuse to buy into another proprietary cartridge. I believe my Bernoulli 150s will still work in 30 years...but only if there is an Iomega driver that works with Windows 2035, and a SCSI cable to connect the drive! Syquest is already out of business.

I still think hard drives are the way to go because they are so standard and modular. As you already know, it is easy to swap between cases. I have a collection of 2.5" drives around because I can swap them between my laptop, external cases, and probably a future Hyperdrive. Those 2.5" hard drives have saved me more than once for laptop rescue operations, backup during travel, etc. My archive is on multiple mirrored 3.5" drives at the moment, with DVDs of critical stuff.

In the future I expect SATA drives to be my modular storage. Not only are they potentially faster, but thanks to the simplified connectors, you can swap one out of a laptop in under one minute.