Iomega's AU$995 10GB external Peerless drive lets you quickly and easily back up your hard drive and transfer large files between PCs. Although there are faster, less costly portable drives on the market today compared to the USB version, Iomega's three-piece modular design could be the foundation for more exciting solutions in the near future.
Iomega's Peerless drive gives you 10GB of removable storage encased in a shell that's about the size of a PDA. (The drive comes in a 20GB configuration as well.) The good news is that the drive can be upgraded when faster and newer bus technologies come along, such as USB 2.0, and additional media can be purchased at a reasonable price (AU$399 for a 10GB cartridge and AU$499 for a 20GB cartridge).
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Iomega has incorporated some interesting new technology into the Peerless drive. Instead of building an entire hard drive around one enclosure, like other manufacturers such as LaCie and Pockey, Iomega has taken the expensive electronics out of the hard drive itself and built them into a base station.
The drive comes in three pieces: the removable disk, the base station (the docking mechanism for the disk), and the interface module (it attaches to the base station). You can buy all three pieces for a reasonable AU$995 (or AU$1,095 for the 20GB version). The benefit to this approach is that Iomega can then sell additional removable disks cheaper (as low as AU$1 per megabyte). The disadvantage is that the Peerless drive is less portable than a one-piece portable drive.
For example, if you want to bring the disk home from the office and access its contents, you'll either need to lug all three pieces or purchase another base station and interface module. Suddenly, the Peerless drive isn't quite so cheap anymore. LaCie's 10GB Pocket Drive, in contrast, is only US$300, has both a USB and FireWire attachment, and doesn't require you to buy extra base stations or interface modules because it's all built in to a single piece of hardware.
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