Iomega Corp. on Thursday introduced the UltraMax 640GB desktop hard drive. Preformatted for Mac OS X, the drive uses two mechanisms striped together as a RAID 0 volume. It costs $449.95 and goes on sale later this month. Look for information to hit Iomega’s Web site next week.
The UltraMax drive uses two 7200 RPM Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drive mechanisms. Users can control the RAID configuration using a manual RAID switch — so you can turn off the RAID all together and use the UltraMax as a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) configuration.
The drive is formatted for HFS+ on Mac OS X, but can be reformatted for NTFS use with Windows PCs, or can be set up for cross-platform use using an included utility.
The UltraMax is stackable and designed to complement Mac Pros and Power Macs — it features a metallic grey exterior with mesh grill. It features FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and three USB 2.0 ports.
Iomega includes EMC’s Retrospect Express backup software. System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.1 or later.