Conclusion
For home or small-office applications, Iomega has accomplished its mission. The REV combines the advantages of a classical hard drive (high performance and direct access) and streamer solutions (easy disk swap-out) in one product. The technical specifications also live up to the vendor's claims. Additionally, Iomega's bundled software, called Automatic Backup Pro, is powerful and easy to use.
Thanks to the USB 2.0 interface, the REV can be connected immediately to practically any current computer system. Unfortunately, in order to write and delete, a Windows driver is required, the installation of which is often impossible for employees in large corporate environments.
Even the handling of the drive and disk was pleasant from the very beginning; the drive's price of well under $400 including one disk is bearable - after all, you're getting a complete backup solution in return.
Our criticism is directed towards the disk price of about $60. If you were to compare the relationship between price and capacity with hard disks, the REV would lose out hands down. Though this comparison may be inappropriate, it is exactly what the average user will be thinking from the start.
On the other hand, an administrator is usually primarily interested in a product's capabilities because the purpose still justifies frequently high prices. The unavailable hardware compression, including the resulting processor load, reduce the qualification from seeing a professional use a little bit. That is, however, made up by the software support that Iomega was able to gain in the industry.
The potential clientele for the REV is thus reduced to demanding power users, the self-employed and small companies who, above all, are after a practical backup solution. In the future, we would like to see a disk price of about $40 as well as model differentiation: The REV in its current form can already meet the needs of almost all users, whereas a "REV Pro" with hardware compression could serve professional customers. Whether or not this will be possible with the SCSI variant remains to be seen.
