Lenovo To Drop Iomega Brand On Joint EMC Products 58
FrankPoole writes "The Iomega brand name will soon be officially laid to rest. Lenovo and EMC, which jointly own the storage company, will replace the Iomega name on all NAS products with 'LenovoEMC.' Lenovo and EMC entered into a joint venture last year, with Lenovo buying partial ownership of Iomega. But because the company name is associated with cheap, consumer storage and ZIP drives, Lenovo is giving Iomega the boot."
Forget ZIP drives (Score:5, Interesting)
The real Iomega product was the Bernoulli Box! [wikipedia.org]
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wow, those things actually came out in 1983!
And worse, I remember them!
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I had to recover a file from one just the other week. First had to find a computer that actually had a printer port. Then I had to hold the ZipDisk just at the right angle for it to read.
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I believe that angle is called "parallel". As in, parallel to the slot in the ZipDrive.
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I believe that angle is called "parallel". As in, parallel to the slot in the ZipDrive.
As opposed to serial, where it eats like the cookie monster!
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Us old-timers still sometimes call it a Centronics port.
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The first one I used was not a very good experience. We went to the store and purchased a parallel port zip drive. We opened the documentation and read the instructions how to set up the parallel port zip drive. We spent too much time on trying to make it work. Then I noticed the little dial on the back with numbers 5-6 on it.
Turns out they had boxed a scsi zip drive in a parallel port box. Since they were both 25pin everything connected just fine.
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT31D8g6cmJ8Ydtu [gstatic.com]
Re:Forget ZIP drives (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, which actually used the Bernoulli Principle to "fly" the heads over the disk surface--150 MB floppy disks essentially! Far more novel than the successive Zip or Jaz drives, convenient/valuable though they also were (I still have one of the latter).
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I loved the zip drives. They were essentially fit the same nice as today's thumb drives in a lot of ways; a big chunk of storage space and much faster than tape or cd burners. The real drawback was that it was proprietary and thus not portable.
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The real drawback was that it was proprietary and thus not portable.
But they were pretty much ubiquitous ca.1999
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Not that ubiquitous. Places where I worked (those that had pcs instead of workstations) wouldn't have that many of them, or they'd have one mobile that you could take for making a backup.
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Funny, I opened the access door on our old laser cutting machine the other day and sure enough, there was a zip drive staring back.
First one i've seen in years. The same laser is still happily running Windows NT 4 Workstation as well.
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The real drawback was that it was proprietary and thus not portable.
There was a zip drive everywhere you needed one but you might or might not be able to find a Syquest drive. I had a 44 MB syquest back in the Amiga days, but I didn't try to swap them with anyone. Just used it to have multiple different boots. My controller had SCSI and MFM and you couldn't boot from MFM, so it was my boot volume. Then later I got a SQ135 and it was positively speedy :)
After zip, unfortunately, is when the UHD floppy was introduced, AKA LS120. 120MB and zip-like access speeds, plus it was a
Re:Forget ZIP drives (Score:4, Interesting)
Those were great. My first Linux system ran off of one (a 150MB) cart, booting off the SCSI interface on the Sound Blaster 16. At the time I'd spent $700 of paper route/lawn mowing money on the 330MB EIDE hard drive, and the 150MB carts were in the $75 range, so it was a great deal. I think the drive was $199. I had a cart for Slackware, a cart for booting the Mac at work with a decent System, and one for media storage. Eventually affordable hard drives started coming in GB numbers, but none of that gear ever failed before it became obsolete. Wish I could say the same about their later products...
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I just got served with Requests for Production that read, in part, "Electronic Media devices may include, but are not limited to, computer memories, hard disks, diskettes and cartridges, network drives, network memory storage, archived tapes and cartridges, backup tapes, floppy disks, CD-ROM, removable media such as Bernoulli Boxes and their equivalent, magnetic tapes of all types, microfiche, punched cards, and any other vehicle used for digital data storage and/or transmittal."
Today I learned Iomega (Score:5, Insightful)
still existed as a name.
Re:Today I learned Iomega (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't know Lenovo owned them. This reminds me a bit of the Cisco+Linksys pairing. Putting a respectable name on a budget line of products doesn't seem to help, it just makes you less sure of anything with the respectable name.
C'mon, /. I'm ashamed to have on my screen (Score:1)
these days... can't even get the correct URL? c'mon!
http://www.crn.com/news/storage/240154127/lenovo-to-drop-iomega-brand-on-joint-emc-products.htm
Do you know what this Means? (Score:5, Funny)
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They should have dropped the name long ago. I won't touch Iomega anything since that fiasco.
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I'd rather see them experience the BSOD. The NT4 driver was terrible for their parallel zip drives.
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I pretty much despised zip disks, I'm not sure what the deal was, but they were always getting corrupted. And they weren't particularly cheap at the time either.
OTOH, my zip CD was actually pretty reliable as a CD burner.
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The thing is, back in the 90s, files were getting big enough that they weren't fitting on a reasonable number of floppy disks. And CD burners were rare (with CD-R's costing dollars each and buffer underruns ruining $5 worth of disc
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You missed out USB thumbdrives which are the de facto replacement for floppies.
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True, though back in the 90s, USB was unheard of, and whatever flash storage was available, was impractically expensive compared to zip disks (when you pay $200 for 32MB...).
It's why one of the more popular digital cameras at the time was the Sony Mavica, because it stored images on floppy drives. Pay $200 for 32MB, or $10 for a box of 10 disks. And with USB being a rarity and slow, card readers were equally difficult and espensi
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I'm afraid of what this means: IBM will be selling "LenovoEMC Legacy Removable Storage Modules" soon.
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It was amazing they were able to spin up. Their actual failure rate was *grotesque* under quite typical loads with those Bernoulli drives. The Zip drives were handy for a while, but soon replaced in my world by having real network connections to real servers.
I'm afraid that any company that company ever hoped to make was eaten up on the expensive replacements of failed hardware.
First Kris Kross and Now the Jaz Drive (Score:2)
Pretty soon, it'll be like the 90s never happened.
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Pretty soon, it'll be like the 90s never happened.
I wouldn't mind, except for Tool and Rage Against the Machine...
Short term thinking (Score:2)
Sounds like short term thinking to me--EMC makes some short term cash, but now their brand is associated with low end NAS devices instead (or at least in addition to) top tier back end storage? This sounds like when Cisco bought Linksys, and rebranded some of the products, with rather predictable results. What idiot wants a low end product associated with a premium brand name?
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It was all downhill at Linksys after the WRT54GL, IMO.
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Of course they did. Cisco sells overpriced crap, when they bought Linksys the cheap Linksys products were often better than 10x more expensive Cisco products. The prediction everybody made after the purchase was that Cisco had to intentionally make Linksys more crap, and they did.
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Lenovo, who gets to destroy EMC's brand name and reap the profit of doing so. Duh.
Now if you are asking why EMC would agree to that it's usually some MBA that just saw the bonus he'd get for signing up for some guaranteed revenue from Lenovo. On the other hand in 6months when EMC takes the PR disaster that's inevitable they will be fuming mad.
Seems reasonable (Score:3)
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I don't know why they ever bought into the name in the first place. I never had any of the drives that exhibited the dreaded "click of death", but once I was foolish enough to buy a CD-RW drive made by someone else but in an Iomega box. It had problems from day 1. I later learned that the manufacturer had firmware updates for their version that fixed the problems, but even years later there were never firmware fixes offered for the Iomega version of the drive. First and last thing with the Iomega name on it that I'll ever buy.
Um... so... wait, I got lost somewhere in there. Are you saying you didn't ever use a Zip Drive and are talking out of your ass in the first bolded part, or that you're using overconfident and demonstrably false terms to try to impress us with your disdain for Iomega, meaning you're still talking out of your ass in the second bolded part?
I say the whole thing is BS. Let's break this down...
I never had any of the drives that exhibited the dreaded "click of death" - implies that he's owned more than one zip/jaz drive.
but once I was foolish enough to buy a CD-RW drive made by someone else but in an Iomega box - so he got a Mitsubishi or other OEM drive that happened to have an Iomega face plate? In that case he should be bitching about the OEM manufacturer. Or does he really mean just the "box", as in, it's a TEAC drive, but the cardboard box
Lenovo vs Iomega reputation (Score:2)
Sounds familiar... (Score:1)
Just take a look at the Lenovo laptop lines of late...."consumer" and "cheap" are becoming their focus point.
Good riddance... (Score:3)
I owned several Iomega products, and they had the worst product life cycle. Some of its driver's products never survived one OS upgrade.
The problem isn't their products were cheap, they simply didn't care about the consumer. At one point customers had to stop buying their stuff.
Huh? (Score:1)
Driver issue or a hardware issue? I always remember my ZIP hardware being solid as a rock.
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Driver issue or a hardware issue? I always remember my ZIP hardware being solid as a rock.
Never had a problem with Zip (never used one enough, perhaps), but the Jaz drives were like single-use disposable. The cartridges outlived the drives.
Fortunately at the time the group I was working with was so profitable that no one cared. We used them to ship gigabyte-sized databases and tossed them as fast as they broke. Abandoned them when we got mainframe-to-mainframe FTP services, though.
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I never understood why Iomega was so popular. (Score:4, Interesting)
It always struck me that Zip drives became so ubiquitous. I looked at them briefly for my own use, and chose the Syquest EZ135 instead. The Syquest had a transfer rate 4 times the speed of the Zip drive, and the access time was half that of Zip. About the same cost for drive and cartridges, but 35MB more data per cartridge. Considering my internal drive was a 40MB SCSI drive, that was something. I swear that sometimes the Syquest felt faster than my internal SCSI drive, though I never benchmarked it.
They always mounted, unlike Zips which sometimes had seating difficulties. Later, when Jaz came out, for the same price you could get the Syjet. A faster drive and 50% more storage. Not as reliable as EZ135, but then again, JAZ was a reliability disaster. Oh, well.
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Iomega was competitive at pricing a notch below Syquest and getting stuff to market early, probably before it was ready. They were the new kids on the block, well-capitalized from Utah, competing with California and Northeastern companies, as I recall it. (Aggressive marketing, just look at how they co-opted the "zip" name from common usage.) One of several episodes from the Computer Shopper era when customers were just relentless on shopping by price & spec, to the detriment of quality. I think the Sy
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It was underruns- and I tended to rarely have them...but then, I wasn't using Windows back then for those sorts of tasks. :-D
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Maybe the old style Syquests were that much, but the EZ135 debuted at $25. A screaming deal at the time.
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I'm guessing they just happened to be in the right place, at the right time - right between floppy disks and recordable CDs. I never bought a ZIP drive, myself, because to me, it was clear they wouldn't be around for long. Ironically, they didn't even really outlast the floppies they were designed to replace.
I always thought it was too bad Fujitsu wasn't better at marketing. For twice the price, their 3-1/2" MO drives could generally hold 3 times as m
Jaz lives on, even if it shouldn't (Score:2)
Worked on a DR project this week with a MAJOR consulting company. Everything was going peachy until they let drop that a major part of the DR process involved restoring data they kept on a Jaz drive.
This is not some old leftover process step, either. We've done this DR thing with them for years and this is the first year they have mentioned a Jaz drive. An awful lot of things ended up relying upon this Jaz drive.
I kept the horror to myself.
Lenovo is cheap too (Score:1)
Isn't the Lenovo company name associated with cheap PC & notebook?
EMC Brand is Worse! (Score:2)
I associate the EMC brand with "shitty, expensive storage that crashes all the time", but maybe that's just me and my personal experience.
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