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[ron thigpen <ron AT fuzzsonic.com>]

Tony Spencer wrote:

> Has anyone used one of these things yet?  It seems like the perfect
> economical backup solution.

I haven't used one, but I'd have to question the economics.  Iomega is 
fudging the drive size numbers in a couple of ways.  It's not a 90GB 
cartridge.

It's nominally a 35GB cartridge if you buy into the nonsense "marketing 
math" that says 1GB equals 1,000,000,000 bytes instead of 1,073,741,824. 
 If you don't, it's a slightly more than 32GB cartridge.

And if you're backing up audio, video or image data you won't get 
anything like a 2.6:1 compression ratio.  More like 1:1.

Current retail on the drive housing is about $300, with cartriges going 
for about $50.

Can't see how this could compete with an external HDD or multi HDD 
enclosure.     An 80GB 7200rpm IDE HDD can be had for about $65.  These 
are competitive in $/GB, save cartridge swapping, are upgradable with 
commodity hardware, etc.  It will also have to compete somewhat with 12x 
(and now 16x) DVD writers.

I could see how this would work if your backups fit on one cartrige and 
you really wanted to send a backup offsite.

--rt