Iomega manufactures portable storage devices which
connect to PCs and Macintoshs.
Scenario:
I am a regular PC user exclusively.
A couple years back, I was a regular Mac user, and my Mac had a dual
personality of a PC as well (very spiffy).
Prior to that I used Macs exclusively. Prior to that PCs. Well, you get the
idea. Circumstances change; computers change.
So I sat down at my PC, popped in one of my archived Mac zip disks, and was prompted with "No data; format?"
Oddly enough, if I dig through some menus and look at properties of the disk,
it does show (properly) that is is a Mac-formatted disk.
Scenario problems:
The big one is interoperability.
Iomega makes the drive hardware, the disk media, and the software...
so why can't I read a Mac disk on my PC?
I find it hard to fathom why there would be a technical reason for making them
non-interchangeable, but even if there is, that's a problem
for Iomega to resolve, not to burden the user with.
From the user perspective, I should be able to pop in a disk
and read the files. (Of course, using the files is a whole different
issue over which Iomega has no control.)
I asked them about this. The solution? I have to purchase
separate software to be able to read a Mac disk on my PC,
a piece of software that another company makes and sells!
A minor issue is consistency.
If I can look at the disk properties and see that it is a Mac-formatted disk,
then when I attempt to read the disk the message I get should say so, rather than saying it is unformatted which is flat wrong!
In a Nutshell:
A good product; it's been around long enough to prove its usefulness and staying power.
