Iomega took great pains in April to make sure that customers, business partners and journalists worldwide got to see for themselves Iomega's new 35 GB external hard drive. With the goal of gaining market share against low- and medium-priced streamer data backup solutions, Iomega claims it has designed a fast, flexible, reliable and inexpensive solution that will show tape solutions to the door.

Following the buzz during the past couple of months that Iomega generated with its optical drives, Iomega is hanging its hat on a new technology: enter the REV, a removable disk system measuring 2.5", with a 35 GB uncompressed data storage capacity.

Iomega, the company that helped pioneer ZIP drives, has long-term hopes for its REV, which is the first product in its line of RRD products (Removable Rigid Disk).

This fall, Iomega is slated to debut internal versions for SCSI and Serial ATA and external models for FireWire/1394 in August. Immediately available are a model with UltraATA and variants with USB 2.0 interface, which we tested. As early as next year, Iomega plans to offer a similar device with 90 GB of capacity. Iomega's roadmap also indicates a launch of 180 GB and 360 GB versions in 2007 and 2009, respectively.

Nevertheless, the stated maximum capacity of 90 GB is suspicious, which is based on an unrealistically high rate of compression. However, such claims are common in the external storage world as the competition's credibility in the capacity-claims department is not one iota better.