This morning I arrived to the office to find to my delight that my new Firewire Iomega REV drive had arrived. I have been waiting for this for a while now as the amount of data on my system is beyond my 80GB DLT backup and mostly personal MP3’s etc.
I quickly open the package, and set about installing the hardware. I can now copy items quickly to my REV drive, but then the problems start.
First problem. I start to copy about 20GB of mp3’s over to the drive and it starts quickly…. about half way though however the thing starts crawling to a halt. I call Iomega about this, and after the now 5 calls on the subject, they are still unable to give me an answer 🙁 Apparently the firewire version “is very new” I am told. Umm… ok… what exactly does that mean?
I am soon to find out that my problems are only beginning. It seems that for some reason. The Norton Ghost (that comes packaged for the REV) also does not correctly load the Firewire DOS drivers and therefore makes that redundant. Again… I am waiting on an update.
Oh… one more… it will not boot from the BIOS as advertised. I really feel let down.
EDIT:
So, I finally got hold of someone in the USA this evening with straight answers. Here they are:
You cannot boot from the firewire version.
You can use the CD to boot, but they are having issues with many firewire ports. I ended up getting mine working on the Soundblaster port and disabling the Dell onboard one.
The slow copy is a known issue if you are copying files to the REV from the local drive and the network at the same time.
The backup software they provide (not the windows backup or Norton Ghost, but the image backup software does not work with the firewire version).
Moral of story: Purchase the USB version.
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