4 x 250GB = Iomega XL Hard Drive

November 29th, 2005

Iomega's going big, though we don't mean big like the ZIP drive. No, we're talking big as in four hard drives stuffed into an external enclosure the size of a subwoofer big. Aptly named the XL Desktop Hard Drive series, this is Iomega's first 1 Terrabyte drive with room to grow.

Currently the only XL drive announced is 1TB, spread across four 7200rpm SATA drives in a hardware RAID-0 configuration. Of course if one of those drives fail you'll be coughing up more profanity than Dennis Leary, but that's another story. Each drive uses a 8MB cache, but in a RAID-0 config there's so much bandwidth that even our favorite interface wouldn't do this thing justice. Thankfully, the drive has multiple interfaces to match your capabilities: USB 2.0, and two FireWire 800 interfaces with a FireWire 400 adapter included for those uber-fast transfers.

The XL Desktop Hard Drives come with backup software preinstalled, Dantz Retrospect for the Mac and Iomega Automatic Backup Pro for the Windows users. The drive runs for $900, but we recommend you take up the pesky sales clerk's offer at your local brick and mortar and get the extended warranty - Iomega will only cover it for a year.

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