Iomega's FireWire Peerless Drive System

After experiencing the wide-spread popularity of its Zip drive, it seems like Iomega comes out with one new unique (not necessarily a good thing) storage device after another. The little blue Zip drive was a part of just about everyone's computing setup before CD-R/RW became affordable (and still isn't such a bad deal for backing up your laptop) but none of the other storage gadgets the company has come up with have achieved the same popularity. The latest storage device that Iomega has come up with is Peerless, which it just re-announced with a with FireWire interface for Macs and Windows computers. The drives use pocket-sized 10GB and 20GB sealed disks and give you interchangeable interface modules that allow you to switch to USB (1.1, not 2.0) if that's your flavor of the day. Iomega says the FireWire interface gives the Peerless drive system a sustained transfer rate of up to 15MB per second on a computer equipped with a FireWire 1394 PCI card. The FireWire-based Peerless drive bundle for Macintosh and Windows computers is available for a suggested $359 (U.S. retail, 10GB bundle) or $399 (U.S. retail, 20GB bundle), and is compatible with Windows 98SE, Me, and 2000, and with Mac OS 8.6 through 9.x. Certification with Windows XP and Mac OS 10.x is in progress. A backup device with 10GB or 20GB removable storage disks sounds like a good idea, but right now the disks list for $159.95 (10GB) and $199.95 (20GB), which is a little expensive for disks that will only work in Iomega's drives. I wonder how many folks ended up with archives stuck on those DittoMax tapes the company now longer supports, not to mention piles of Zip disks without a working drive so that you can move files onto your hard drive to burn onto CDs. Sorry, just had a little personal experience rear its head.