I can't remember the last time I saw an Iomega product, let alone one that I was amazed at.

The Zip drive was their last big innovation and even that seems pretty dull by modern engineering standards (100MB was a lot of data storage back in the mid 90s).

Lets not mention the Iomega Buz either, their video capture card. Good hardware, totally rubbish drivers and it was pretty much abandonware from day one.

Hi Giles

Check out the Iomega web site and see what they make. The Apple store carries plenty of Iomega kit and at the last Mac show here in London Iomega had a a good stand with plenty of NAS and other assorted kit.

In the last couple of years I have supplied more Iomega external drives to customers than any other brand. - In my recent experience they are more reliable than Lacie.

I had an Iomega Buzz, when it was stable it was fantastic, that wasn't very offen though. It was over ten years before I bought another product by them and that was only because it was a harddisk in a box and (you'd hope) therefore impossible to screw up.

I have rarely been subject to such a total lack of customer services, I'd rate them as about point eight of a First Great Western.

Don't forget the Click Of Death on early zip drives. I seem to remember a bunch of my mates from uni getting their zip drives stuffed by that one. They suffered shitty customer services as well...

I never had problems with any of my Iomega hardware. In fact, my 2GB Jaz drive, God bless it, still runs and still stores some of my software and my archives.

I guess it just depends on how well you treat your hardware. That said, Iomega was very obliging when I asked whether they would have a driver for the PP Zip 100 drive for Windows NT 4 to save me from having to boot into *blechhh* Windows 3.1 to use it. I guess I was one of many because 6 months later I got an email from them asking whether I'd like to test the driver. And a year after that, they had integrated it into their software completely and it was rock solid.

So no, never had a customer service issue with Iomega, never had a hardware failure, never had a problem anywhere. I wouldn't mind owning more of their stuff, but it's all niche stuff, and sadly, niche ain't my style.

unfortunately the high cartridge price meant many people went for the lower end zip drives, which had a pretty high failiure rate.