MWSF - Iomega Announces New Peerless Drive System

by , 10:00 AM EST, January 8th, 2001

Iomega Corporation has announced a new modular drive platform for PC and Macintosh users: the Iomega Peerless drive system. The new design leaps past optical with 5GB, 10GB and 20GB removable disks. According to Iomega:

Debuting this month at CES and MacWorld and expected to ship mid-year in the U.S., the Peerless drive system represents a new generation of high performance data storage devices that delivers market-leading affordability, versatility and reliability.

The Peerless disk, which incorporates world-class hard drive technology in 5GB, 10GB and 20GB capacities, is roughly the size and shape of a PDA. It slips into a base station only slightly larger than the disk itself; a slim, vertical enclosure about four inches across and five inches tall. The Peerless drive system offers up to ten times the performance and massively greater storage capacity than CD-RW, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, or DVD+RW alternatives.

Two key design innovations contribute to the Peerless drive system's price-performance leadership. The first is Iomega's integration of read/write heads into fully sealed 5GB, 10GB and 20GB removable disks, an advance that eliminates the risk of dust contamination and allows sustained transfer rates in the range of an expected 15 MB/sec (with FireWire module). The second is the relocation of the hard drive electronics from the Peerless disks to the base station, an Iomega breakthrough that is a first in the hard drive industry. The result is disk prices as low as an expected one cent per megabyte.

It uses industry-standard interfaces for simple integration into new devices. A wide range of new and exciting products, from mobile multimedia devices to radical new computer designs, stand to benefit from it.

Peerless disks include chip-based identifier technology to enable data security, protecting against unauthorized attempts to read the contents of a lost or stolen disk. The ability to back up critical content to Peerless disks for high-speed random access retrieval also means a new alternative to tape drives in some applications. As an enabling technology, the Peerless drive system can be the basis of hardware designs that give multiple users their own portable environment on a disk.

The Iomega Peerless drive system will be available in mid-2001 in the US, and in the third quarter in Europe and Asia/Pacific. The drive will cost US$249. Peerless disks are expected to retail for $129 (5GB), $159 (10GB) and $199 (20GB). FireWire and USB 1.1 interface should be available at launch, with USB 2.0 and SCSI later. You can find more information about it at Iomega's site.

Iomega Corporation