Iomega Launches Solid State Drives for SMB, Consumers

Iomega unveiled large-capacity SSD drives on Friday aimed at consumer and SMB markets. The largest one, at 256GB, will be available for $748 in November.

Iomega, an EMC unit, also announced a 64GB SSD flash drive for $229 and a 128GB drive for $399. The company targets the high-capacity consumer devices at SMBs and creative professionals whose high performance requires advanced capabilities. All three drives have built-in encryption security.

The announcement marked Iomega’s second important consumer/SMB device in a matter of days. On Wednesday, the company launched a 1-TB network storage appliance, the StorCenter ix. The $300 system can be configured with four mouse clicks and can back up multiple devices and computers, Iomega said.

The SSD drives offer easy portability. Iomega said that the USB 3.0 drives have no moving parts and require no external power supply. Iomega noted that it also offers USB 3.0 adapter cards that can be inserted into USB 2.0 devices to enable 3.0 transfer speeds of up to 5 gigabits per second.

Iomega said that the drives come with Iomega’s Protection Suite of backup and anti-virus software to protect important user files.

Citing the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface, Iomega added that the SSD flash drives can deliver speeds 10 times that of USB 2.0 drives and twice as fast as a 7,200-RPM SATA hard drive using the same USB 3.0 interface. The SSD drives are aimed at professional videographers, photographers and other creative professionals.