Iomegea: King of Overpriced Storage

If you’re not familiar with the company, Iomega makes storage devices and for as long as I can remember, they seem to always be at the bleeding edge of capacity. Today, Engadget reported that Iomega has just announced the Power Pro Desktop Hard Drive. It offers up a whopping 2 Terabytes of storage. It’s essentially 4 500 GB drives shoved into one box. Interestingly, it offers optional RAID setup so you can mirror 1TB of data for extra security.

Over the years Iomega has had their fair share of proprietary formats that never really made it anywhere. For example: The Bernoulli, the Ditto, Zip, Jaz, Pocket Zip, ZipCD, REV, and the Peerless. While just about all of these had loads of storage for their time period (as does the Power Pro today) they never made it very far for a few reasons. The first, is that they are all proprietary formats. In order to make use of these you have to by an Iomega cradle or connector or drive depending on how the device worked and also you had to by the media from them, which eliminates competitive pricing.

Pricing is the single biggest barrier to entry for these products that I can think of. The REV drive, which offers a range of 35 to 70 GB of storage, goes for about $50 per cartridge. In addition to that you have to by the drive, which retails for $399 and comes with just one 35GB cart. Just like it’s companions and predecessors the Power Pro is also remarkably expensive, demanding a (nearly insane) $1,700. Wow, just wow is all I can say to that. Internal 500 GB drives run for well under $200 which prices one Terabyte something around $700, a full $1000 less, all you would need is a computer with space for the drives, or some external enclosures.

I’m not who decides Iomega’s pricing and product strategies, but I feel like they need to be fired. What is most remarkable is that they’ve been making overprices janky stuff for over 25 years now, and they’re still around.