If they would sell empty BYO-drive cartridges on the cheap this would be a very good product.
Instead they want you to buy overpriced cartridges with small drives pre-installed.

An example of how greed can ruin a good product...

How does this compare with a ICY Dock solution or even buying separate HD's. At those prices, once could just replace the entire cartridge with an external drive.

Holy smokes, US$310 for a 120GB cartridge?

Interesting idea, making hard drives look like tapes in hardware rather than relying on obtuse Backup To Disk options in various tape backup software solutions. But with inexpensive LTO now available in convenient 1/3-height form factor, or my 160GB (uncompressed) SDLT which is fast enough that it's limited only by the PCI bus the HBA resides on, and whose cartridges now cost less than $50 individually, I'm not so sure the concept is ready for everyone.

Great alternative for folks with modest capacity demands who use portable USB drives as backups, and the bundled Backup Exec variant will help those people achieve more functional backups and enhance their restore capabilities, but at this cost it just doesn't scale.

did the same thing with standard hard drive and enclosures
6-250gb hard drives
5-hard drive cases
1-Hard case and caddy
1-tx4000 sata controller
for under 1200
that’s the price point that they should be looking at otherwise don’t even try
that's $0.80 a gb

No i don’t think i am it says "Challenge Tape Backup"
The drive caddy’s had shock absorbers built in them for drops
And if you making backup what dose size have do with any thing
Accept the chance to loose it

If you want a mobile storage system that is some thing different then a tape backup

They Travel just fine i stronger enough to lift 1 pound
and there quite mobile enough for backups
now if your taking them to another country then is there may be a size problem
other then that you give up speed capacity compatibility and price for one thing size

So after a major catastrophe (say a fire) i suppose to wait for a proprietary drive to be shipped in before i can start a restore
That’s if it’s still available (I guess you can get it off of eBay)

That’s a bad backup strategy

This is a great article about the rugged, portable, removable hard disk drive, but it is about three years late. There have been a few super
removable storage devices on the market for this time period. For example the HardTape (http://www.hardtape.com) removable device which entered the market in 2003 and since then it supported large
customers like Kodak, XDCinema for their digital movie distribution,
Hitachi Denshi using their digital camera, Nebtek and nNovia for video editing systems, Digital Fusion using the product under the HardFilm logo for their high end photo system, the US Marines using the product under dirty environments and many others. The HardTape has a Floppy size
form factor rather than the RDX QuickStor which is compatible with the
larger CD format. Beyond the RDX QuickStor SATA interface the HardTape offers interchangeable AT/IDE, SATA, USB 2.0, Firewire, Narrow and Wide SCSI Docking Bay, Cable, External Drive and Security System interfaces.

The shipments of these drives have the highest reliability data among all disk drives shipped on the market today. Perhaps potential customers should make a comparison between the RDX QuikStor and other products
on the market today beyond the Iomega Rev products.

Just a note: You are right that many servers don't have free 5.25-inch form factor bays. However all servers have multiple 3.5-inch slots for the hard disk drives. If you look at the HardTape (http://www.hardtape.com) Bay and Cartridge it has exactly the same form factor (1"x4"x6" ) and identical interfaces (AT/IDE, USB 2.0, Firewire, eSATA, Narrow and wide SCSI) as the 3.5-inch drives. The big advantage of using an internal Cartridge and Bay is that you do not need to carry an external power supply.

The REV device has limited capacity and it is not interchangeable with different capacity drives.

GoVault Cartridge dimensions: 1"x3.37"x4.4"
HardTape Cartridge dimensions: 0.66"x3.14"x5.11"

Due to the slimness of the HardTape Cartridge this is truly a shirt pocket size device.

I just check with the technical staff at AUDAVI. The HardTape storage device, although not mentioned on their technical specification, it is totally compatible withe the Server 2003. A number of applications are used
in this fashion. Soon you will be able to see on their updated web site this addition in their specs XP/98/2000/Server 2003.