REV was a removable hard disk storage system from Iomega.
The small removable cartridges store 35, 70, or 120 gigabytes and were based on hard-drive technology. Like a standard hard drive, the REV system used a flying head to read and write data to a spinning platter. The removable cartridges contained the platter, spindle, and motor, while the drive heads and drive controller were contained within the REV drive. The drives allowed for data transfer rates of about 25 megabytes per second.
The REV was available as an external desktop model with FireWire, SCSI or USB 2.0 interfaces, an internal model with SCSI, ATAPI, or SATA interfaces, or an external server model which features a cartridge autoloader and SCSI interface. Iomega also offered a 320 GB network-attached storage appliance which features a built-in REV. The drives were compatible with Macintosh, Windows, and Linux operating systems, although some only with particular models or interfaces.
This product, especially the server model, was marketed as a replacement of tape drive technology for enterprise data backup, with claims of higher reliability, greater speed, and random access capability.
The REV was in many ways a successor to Iomega's Jaz drive, which used a similar removable hard-disk-platter concept. However the Jaz design did not put the drive motor in the cartridge. In some circles, REV drives were referred to as RRD, for "Removable Rigid Disk," because SCSI REV drives identify themselves as "RRD" drives to the host OS.
The drives were formatted with the UDF file system on Windows and Unix/Linux. On Apple systems, they may be formatted as HFS+ or UDF in Mac OS X.
A similar competing technology is RDX Technology
The drives suffered from poor reliability and high failure rates of both the disk mechanism and power supply units (on the external versions). Faced with cheaper, smaller, higher capacity and more reliable USB 2.5" portable hard drives, the REV format was discontinued:
35GB - 8/31/2009 70GB - 12/14/2009 120GB - 1/25/2010