Ask Dr. Bob: The Lowdown on Iomega's Peerless Disks

Do you have any experience with Iomega's new Peerless FireWire or USB storage drives?

The Peerless drive systems consist of a base station and either a FireWire (IEEE 1394) or USB 1.1 interface module; I have one of each. The Peerless drives are good products.

If your machine doesn't already have a FireWire port, the USB drive is easier to install. However, the FireWire drive offers better performance—equal to some moderate-performance laptop hard disks, in my experience. Both drives perform well with Windows 2000; I haven't yet tried them with Windows XP. The equipment can be a little bulky to carry in a laptop bag, but these products are affordable enough (less than $400 per bundle) that you could keep one drive at work and one drive at home. The media is small enough to carry easily between locations. You can use either 10GB or 20GB Peerless disks with either drive interface. This capacity is sufficient for most notebook backup operations and simplifies data transportation.