Iomega is planning to launch two removable magnetic-based storage formats in the first half of next year, one aimed at small and medium enterprises and the other at consumer users, company executives said Monday.
The new storage format for consumers is Digital Capture Technology (DCT). It will be launched in the first half of next year, Scott Sheehan, vice president of business development at Iomega, said at a news conference in Tokyo.
DCT disks are about 2 inches in diameter and look similar to the company's now-defunct Pocket Zip, or Clik, disks but can hold much more data. First-generation versions will have a capacity of 1.5GB, compared with the 100MB of the Pocket Zip. Drives will be available either for integration into products or, as with the earlier Pocket Zip format, in a PC Card form factor that can be plugged into a personal computer or other device.
Digital Devices
The system is targeted for use in digital consumer electronics, and Iomega is already in discussions with a number of such companies, said Sheehan. He declined to reveal which companies, although he said possible products include digital camcorders, portable video players, portable music players, and devices with PC Card slots such as televisions.
DCT will be launched at the Consumer Electronics Show, which is scheduled to take place in Las Vegas in January next year, and Iomega expects to launch the format commercially in the latter part of the second quarter. The PC Card drives are expected to cost around $149, and disks will cost around $10 each, said Sheehan.
Iomega's road map for the technology calls for disk capacity to double within two years of launch and to double again within two years after that, he said. The company is also looking at smaller form factors, such as CompactFlash, based on the same technology. As a minimum Iomega expects that a CF version would have a capacity of 1GB if commercialized, said Sheehan.
Down to Business
Small and midsize businesses won't have to wait as long as consumers to try out one of Iomega's storage formats. The Removable Rigid Disk (RRD) format will offer a capacity of 35GB per cartridge, Sheehan said. The cartridge contains the media platter and spindle motor components of a hard disk, while the drive includes the read/write head, the eject mechanism, and the interface.
"We see potential for RRD in a number of areas, primarily as tape replacement in small and medium businesses where tape is currently used for backup and recovery," said Sheehan.
Chief competing formats will include DDS (Digital Data Storage), Travan, and low-end DLT (Digital Linear Tape), according to Sheehan. He said RRD will offer potential users a number of advantages over those and other tape and optical disc-based backup formats because it will combine the speed and performance of a hard drive with the portability of those competing products.
Higher Speeds
Provisional specifications issued by Iomega show an average data transfer rate of 18MB per second. That compares favorably to a rate of up to 3 MBps for DLT, 2 MBps for Travan, and around 5.5 MBps for recordable DVD, according to Iomega. File access time is similarly fast at around 13 milliseconds.
"What this means to small-system business users is that a typical 20GB back up will take 20 minutes instead of 2 hours," he said.
RRD is also bootable, and Iomega has developed a system called "boot and run" that will make it possible to launch a system directly from a backup in the event of a system failure, said Sheehan.
"We will announce the product at Comdex," he said referring to the Comdex 2003 trade show that will take place in Las Vegas from November 17. Iomega will demonstrate working prototypes of RRD at the show, as well as interoperability with servers from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and NEC, and backup software from Computer Associates International, Veritas Software, and Dantz Development.
Drives are scheduled to be commercially available in the first quarter of 2004, and Iomega expects to have products supporting USB, ATAPI, SCSI, and Serial ATA interfaces, he said. Drives are projected to cost $349, with each 35GB cartridge costing between $39 and $49, according to Sheehan.
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