Removable Storage Makes a Comeback

By David Pogue

June 28, 2007 11:56AM

If you have ever felt as though you cannot keep up with the pace of life, well, it could have been worse. You could have been a computer disk.

Remember the floppy disk (800 KB)? The SyQuest cartridge (44 MB)? The Zip disk (100 MB)? The Jaz disk (1 GB)? The recordable DVD (4.7 GB)?

Each one seemed at first like a handy system for making backups and transporting files. But as computer hard drives grew, and the kinds of files we kept on them ballooned (from photos to music to video), those removable disks wound up looking pathetically puny.

Nowadays, it is not unusual for a new computer to come with a 320-GB hard drive. Are you really going to back it up onto 68 blank DVDs? Or 444,431 floppies?

It has been years since there was a cartridge system on every desk. But like the hip-huggers, side ponytails and other fads of the 1980s, removables are making a comeback. At least three companies — Iomega, Quantum, and ProStor — now offer cartridge systems that are just as convenient and transportable as Iomega’s Zip disks were, but with enough capacity to back up a hard drive.

That’s because the cartridges actually are hard drives, or at least the spinning guts of them.

Your initial outlay is for the drive itself. Each company makes both an internal model, which is installed inside a computer, and an external one that sits on your desk and connects with a USB cable.

The price is fairly high; for example, the external Rev drive from Iomega costs $511, the GoVault from Quantum is around $438 and the RDX drive made by ProStor is on special from Dell for $300. Each drive includes one starter cartridge. ProStor does not actually sell its RDX systems. Instead, you buy RDX drives from Dell, Imation, Tandberg and Exabyte under their own names. The Dell model I tested is called the PowerVault RD 1000.

The drive itself is just a dock with electronics and power circuitry. Into this shell, you slide the interchangeable cartridges that contain your data. All three drives leave one cartridge edge exposed — the edge with the label — so you can see at a glance which cartridge is inserted.
Once inserted, the cartridge behaves much like a hard drive. Backup software is included with all three drives. Quantum’s superb backup program, for example, crams more onto your cartridges using “de-duplication” — storing only new sections of documents you have already backed up.
The drives are silent and fast. On a Windows PC, copying a 1.5-GB folder full of large and small files took 80 seconds on the Quantum and 90 seconds on the Rev and RDX drives.

The Quantum GoVault cartridges come in several sizes, from 40 GB to 120 GB; RDX cartridges range from 40 to 160 gigs. It is very cool how a single drive can accommodate cartridges of all different capacities, present and future.

Iomega, on the other hand, intends to keep releasing new drives to accommodate larger-capacity cartridges. The current drive takes 70-GB cartridges. It also accepts the 35-gig cartridges of its original 2004 Rev drive, but “plays” them much slower.

All three cartridge types are incredibly rugged. They are intended to be handled, tossed, shoved around, shipped and even dropped. The Quantum and RDX cartridges are incredibly rugged. They can shrug off one-meter drops, or 3.2 feet, onto concrete — a claim my kids and I had a glorious time investigating.

The smaller Rev cartridges are built differently. Whereas each Quantum and RDX cartridge is a complete, sealed, shock-mounted 2.5-inch hard drive, the Rev cartridge contains only the spinning platter and the motor. The delicate stuff, like the read-write heads (the “needle” that plays the disk) are in the drive.

As a result, Rev cartridges are slightly less tough; they can handle only one-meter drops onto “industrial carpet.”

Still, anyone who nervously recalls the “click of death” that occasionally haunted Iomega’s previous storage systems, like Zip and Jaz, should be reassured; Rev drives have been on the market since 2004 (Iomega says that it has sold a million cartridges), and even a Google search fails to reveal any Jaz-like community of bereaved customers with failed cartridges.

To drive home the point, each cartridge comes with a video that depicts banks of Rev drives being tested in vibration machines, dust chambers, refrigerators and ovens, and coming out smiling. Rev is also the only product that works on both Mac and Windows, and the only one available in both USB-connector and FireWire-connector editions.

These cartridge systems sound great, right? Fast, tough, capacious — what more could you ask?

Sane pricing. You will pay $110 for Quantum’s 40-GB cartridge and $250 for a 120-gig cartridge. The RDX cartridges are priced similarly, ranging from $118 (40 GB) to $270 (160 gigs).
Sorry, but that’s just nuts. For a fraction of that price, you could just buy a big old hard drive. A 250-GB internal drive costs about $66, for heaven’s sake. Of course, the beauty of the cartridges is that they are transportable. A proper backup system involves storing a copy of your data off site, not in your office. So a more apt comparison would be with those little pocket hard drives — external USB drives like Seagate’s FreeAgent Go or Hewlett-Packard’s Pocket Media drive.
But these, too, cost less than cartridges. A 120-GB pocket hard drive costs about $85 — about a third the price of the same-size Quantum cartridge. Iomega Rev cartridges are much more reasonably priced: $270 for a five-pack, which comes to $54 each.

Even so, that is 77 cents a gigabyte compared with 71 cents for a self-contained pocket hard drive. You do not even want to know the Quantum and RDX cost per gigabyte. All right, maybe you do: $2.08 and $1.70, respectively. And I’m not even counting the price of the drive.

So what, exactly, is the value proposition here?

All three companies stress that their products are not intended for everyday desktop storage. These systems are supposed to be small-business backup machines. They are intended to replace tape-backup drives, which thousands of small businesses use. Sure enough: Compared with these cartridges, tape backup systems are slow, unreliable and high-maintenance. You do not have random instant access to files, and tracking and managing the tapes themselves is a headache.

Well, fine. If that’s the cartridge companies’ narrowly defined mission — replacing tape-backup systems for small business — then congratulations, they have succeeded. But the technology in these systems, including their speed, convenience, silence, compactness and reliability, is terrific. If it weren’t for the nosebleed pricing, cartridge systems would find a huge and happy home among everyday computer users.

This time, the disk engineers have figured out how to create cartridge capacities that keep up with the pace of life. Now we just have to get the marketing executives on board.