Iomega's REV Marks Leap Forward For External Drives

Data Compression 2.5 : 1

Initial situation: Uncompressed, the data stock is copied 1:1 to the REV.

We have allowed ourselves to test data compression using preset data stocks. This data involved 28.3 GB of usable data (28.4 GB space requirement) of various types in a total of roughly 52,000 files. Most of the benchmarks that we use were included in the data, as well as a few movies and music files and an extensive project index, which contains an abundance of office documents.

Activating the small compression level reduced the memory space requirements from 28.4 to only 23.8 GB. In view of the mostly poorly compressed initial data, this is a respectable result, although it by no means equals a ratio of 2.5 : 1.

Selecting high data compression reduced the memory requirement once again by approximately 100 MB, but unfortunately it further increases the CPU load, which is already high to begin with. Details can be found on the following pages.

The low compression level saves a good deal of memory space.

Compared to that, high compression does not make much sense because the side effect is a high load to the CPU.