ROY, UT (Jan. 5, 2001) -- Iomega Corporation has announced a modular drive platform for PC and Macintosh users that the company says will offer more storage capacities than CD-RW, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, or DVD+RW drive. Iomega calls the technology the Peerless drive system. It is expected to feature initial hard disk capacities of 5GB, 10GB and 20GB. Iomega says the drive system will be roughly the size of a personal digital assistant and will connect to the computer via USB and FireWire connections. The drive will slip into a base station that will house much like that of a Palm Pilot or Handspring Visor and is expected to handle multiple video streams and produce sustained transfer rates of of 15MB/sec with the FireWire module. In what Iomega calls a first in the industry, the hard drive electronics will be housed in the base station rather than on the Peerless disks.

In addition to digital video applications, Iomega says the Peerless disk system can be used with such applications as 3D, CAD/CAM, software development, database management, entertainment authoring, and other applications that consume large amounts of disk space.  

Price and availability
The Iomega Peerless drive system is expected to ship by the middle of 2001. The drive with FireWire and USB 1.1 interface modules is expected to retail for $249, and the individual disks are expected to  cost $129 (5GB), $159 (10GB) and $199 (20GB). USB 2.0 and SCSI interface modules are expected following the initial shipment of the product.

For more information visit Iomega on the Web at iomega.com.