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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: eric larson who wrote (56298)	6/17/1998 6:22:00 PM
From: eric larson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58324

FAQ Section [re Clik! drive] from the white paper: (pg.14 of clik.pdf at iomega.com ) Power consumption in excess of Flash solutions This is the same debate we had for laptops between rotating magnetic media storage and solid- state storage. The overall power consumption of a Clik! drive under actual use condition is very consistent for a portable consumer device such as digital camera. The faster write speed of the Clik! system and the built-in power down modes allow the designers to manage the consumption of battery power during camera usage. Remember a flash write operation is frequently preceded by an erase operation which increases the overall power consumption and slows down transfer. The clik! drive is only using power for the amount of time writing the image to the disk. Robustness of rotating media in consumer environments Once again we had this debate over laptops. In addition, the use of 3.5" floppy disks in the Sony Mavica and Sharp's Minidisc cameras all serve to demonstrate the robustness of the rotating media in consumer environments, and is already well accepted and proven. The susceptibility to corruption and limited life (mtbf) The useful life of the Clik! system much exceeds that of the Flash memory cards. The limited write-erase cycle (flash chips are typically guaranteed to 10,000 write/erase cycles) is an inherent limitation in the flash technology and makes it unsuitable for an application with frequent write-erase-write cycles (such as a digital camera). It is extremely unlikely the data stored on the Clik! will be corrupted during normal usage. A popular misconception is that a common magnet can inadvertently corrupt the data on a magnetic disk. As an illustration, you would need a magnet 50 times stronger than a common household refrigerator magnet to begin damaging the data on the Clik! disk. Cost of drive in camera or printer device versus flash Actually, the cost to an OEM to incorporate 40 MB of flash card storage into a camera is much higher than adding a Clik! system, disk included! Throw in a second card or disk and the ratio becomes overwhelmingly in favor of Clik!. Long term plans for migrating valuable images to current media formats and from media with life cycles of less than 10-15 years Another good reason for Clik!. The cost of the flash card is not practical for use as a long-term media for storing all of the captured images (the shoe box analogy). Few of us could or want to keep a bunch of $30, $50 and $100+ Flash cards around as archival storage. However, we are already comfortable using magnetic disks such as Zip for both long-term and short-term storage. The cost and life of the Clik! disk is very similar to that of video tapes which consumers have already demonstrated an acceptance for as long-term storage.