REV is a removable

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...

storage system from

Iomega Iomega (later LenovoEMC) produced external, portable, and networked data storage products. Established in the 1980s in Roy, Utah, United States, Iomega sold more than 410 million digital storage drives and disks, including the Zip drive floppy d ...

. The small removable disks store 35, 70, or 120 gigabytes (GB) and are hard-drive technology. Like a standard hard drive, the REV system uses a flying head to read and write data to a spinning platter. The removable disks contained the platter, spindle, and motor, while the drive heads and drive controller are contained within the REV drive. The drives allow for data transfer rates of about 25 megabytes (MB) per second. The REV was available as an external desktop model with

FireWire IEEE 1394 is an interface standard for a serial bus for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. It was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple in cooperation with a number of companies, primarily Sony an ...

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...

USB 2.0 Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

interfaces, an internal model with

, ATAPI, or

SATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard to ...

interfaces, or an external server model which features a cartridge

autoloader An autoloader or auto-loader is a mechanical aid or replacement for the personnel that load ordnance into crew-served weapons without being an integrated part of the gun itself. The term is generally only applied to larger weapons, such as nava ...

and SCSI interface. Iomega also offered a 320 GB

network-attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level (as opposed to block-level storage) computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the tech ...

appliance which features a built-in REV. The drives are compatible with

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

, and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s, although some only with particular models or interfaces. This product, especially the server model, was marketed as a replacement of

tape drive A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and a long archival stability. ...

technology for enterprise data

backup In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "back up", w ...

, with claims of higher reliability, greater speed, and

random access Random access (more precisely and more generally called direct access) is the ability to access an arbitrary element of a sequence in equal time or any datum from a population of addressable elements roughly as easily and efficiently as any othe ...

capability. The REV was in many ways a successor to Iomega's Jaz drive, which uses a similar removable hard-disk-platter concept. However the Jaz design does not put the drive motor in the disk case. In some circles, REV drives are referred to as "RRD," for "Removable Rigid Disk," because SCSI REV drives identify themselves as "RRD" drives to the host OS. The disks are formatted with the UDF

file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...

on Windows and

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

. On Apple systems, they may be formatted as

HFS+ HFS Plus or HFS+ (also known as Mac OS Extended or HFS Extended) is a journaling file system developed by Apple Inc. It replaced the Hierarchical File System (HFS) as the primary file system of Apple computers with the 1998 release of Mac OS 8.1 ...

or UDF in

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

. A ''seemingly''-similar competing technology is

RDX Technology RDX is a disk-based removable storage format developed by ProStor Systems Incorporated in 2004. In May 2011, Tandberg Data GmbH acquired the RDX business from ProStor Systems including intellectual property and key members of ProStor's RDX engineer ...

. A key distinction, however, is that the REV drive heads and drive controller remain inside the drive when the hard-disk platter is removed from it. In

, the drive heads are contained within the cartridge along with the platter and are removed along with it. The drives suffer from poor reliability and high failure rates of both the disk mechanism and power supply units (on the external versions). Faced with cheaper, smaller, higher capacity and more reliable USB 2.5" portable hard drives, the REV format was discontinued: *35 GB - August 31, 2009 *70 GB - December 14, 2009 *120 GB - January 25, 2010

References

"Iomega Introduces REV 120GB Backup Drive"

* ttp://iomrrdtools.sourceforge.net/ "sourceforge.net IOM RRD Tools" {{Iomega storage devices Hard disk drives Iomega storage devices

See also

References