Iomega touts 'Peerless' storage drive

LAS VEGAS - Iomega Friday announced a new removable storage system, dubbed the Iomega Peerless drive, which it plans to launch later this year in 5G-byte, 10G-byte and 20G-byte versions.

Peerless drives are about the size of a PDA, and slip into a base station about 4 inches across and 5 inches tall. The drive can be used with PC and Macintosh computers, but could also be used with new types of devices for playing music and video on the road, such as an in-car video player, Iomega said in a statement issued Friday.

The device will be shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show-CES, which got underway in earnest Saturday morning.

Iomega is positioning the drive as a faster, more affordable alternative to optical drive technologies such as CD-RW and DVD which can't store as much data and don't perform as quickly, according to Iomega. The company said the Peerless drive will make light work of tasks such as editing digital video sequences and backing up large hard-drive partitions.

For corporate users, Peerless drives include a chip-based "identifier technology" that can be used to secure data from unauthorized use. In the workplace, the Peerless drive could also be useful for 3-D CAD/CAM -- computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing, software development and database management, Iomega said.

Iomega said it created the drive by integrating read/write heads into sealed, 5G-byte, 10G-byte and 20G-byte removable disks, an advance that it says can eliminate the risk of dust contamination and enable data transfer rates of "an expected" 15M bit/sec when used with a FireWire connection.

Iomega also shifted some of the hard drive's electronics from the Peerless disks themselves to the base station, a development that will allow the company to offer disks priced as low as one U.S. cent per megabyte, Iomega said.

The Peerless drive is expected to begin shipping midyear to U.S. retailers, with shipments to Europe and Asia-Pacific following in the third quarter. The drive is expected to retail for $249, and disks will be priced at $129 (5G bytes), $159 (10G bytes) and $199 (20G bytes), Iomega said. FireWire and USB 1.1 interface modules are expected to be available at the launch, with USB 2.0 and SCSI modules available at a later date. Pricing for those modules wasn't immediately available.

The Peerless drive will compete with a host of alternative storage technologies on the market, including Flotec Engineering Inc.'s Pockey drive, which comes in 6G-byte and 20G-byte versions, and LaCie Group SA's PocketDrive, which also supports FireWire and comes in 10G-byte and 30G-byte models.

Thursday, Iomega released a USB version of its 250M-byte Zip Drive that draws its power from a PC instead of requiring an additional electrical cable. The Zip drive is priced at $179.95 and comes with one 250M-byte disk.

Iomega, based in Utah can be reached at 801-332-5413 or http://www.iomega.com/.