Iomega covered a lot of ground — the famous Zip and Jaz removable disks, REV cartridges, eGo and Prestige external hard drives, and the StorCenter network drives that later became LenovoEMC. Whatever the format, if it held your files and it’s stopped working, it’s almost certainly recoverable. Here’s how each type is handled.
Zip and REV media, external hard drives, or a StorCenter NAS — each needs a slightly different approach, but the principle is the same: read it without changing it, then rebuild a copy.
Few storage brands spanned as many formats as Iomega. Most people remember the Zip and Jaz removable disks of the late 1990s, and the later REV cartridges; alongside those, Iomega sold a wide range of external hard drives (eGo, Prestige, Home Media) and the StorCenter network-attached storage line, which continued under the LenovoEMC name. Each has its own failure modes, so it helps to take them in turn.
Zip drives are notorious for the “click of death” — a failing drive head that clicks and can physically damage the disk it’s reading, sometimes spreading the fault from disk to disk. If a Zip or Jaz disk holds something irreplaceable, the worst thing to do is keep feeding it into a suspect drive. Recovery of removable media is specialist and format-dependent, and how much comes back depends on the state of both the cartridge and a known-good drive to read it in — which the free diagnostic assesses honestly before any commitment.
Iomega external drives contain a standard hard disk, so recovery is conventional drive work: for a bare external, take the disk out and send the drive rather than the whole enclosure — unless it’s one of the encrypted models, where the enclosure’s bridge does the encryption and the whole unit must come in so we can decrypt in the original hardware. StorCenter and Home Media NAS units are different again: they run a Linux-based RAID, and the safest thing is to send the whole unit (or the drives labelled in bay order) so the array can be rebuilt offline. NAS and RAID recovery starts from £500 +VAT; a single external drive is from £300 +VAT.
Often, yes, though removable-media recovery is specialist and depends on the state of the cartridge and having a known-good drive to read it in. The key is to stop using a clicking Zip drive immediately — the “click of death” can damage the disk further. Send it in and we’ll assess it honestly on the free diagnostic before you commit to anything.
Yes. An Iomega external is a standard hard drive in an enclosure, so this is conventional recovery. Take the drive out and send it rather than the whole caddy — unless it’s an encrypted model, in which case send the complete unit so the encryption bridge can be used. Either way, single-drive recovery is from £300 +VAT after a free diagnostic.
Send the whole unit, or the drives labelled with their bay order — a StorCenter runs a Linux RAID, and we rebuild the array offline from read-only images of the disks rather than touching the originals. Don’t let it re-initialise or rebuild onto a replacement disk first. NAS recovery starts from £500 +VAT.
The StorCenter NAS line continued under the LenovoEMC brand after Iomega, so later network drives may carry that name. For recovery it makes no difference — the underlying Linux RAID is handled the same way.
A single external or removable drive is from £300 +VAT; a StorCenter or other NAS is from £500 +VAT. Removable media like Zip and Jaz is quoted after diagnosis because it varies so much. In every case you get a free diagnostic and a fixed written quote first.
Tell us which Iomega device it is and what it’s doing — drive out for a bare external, whole unit for anything encrypted or a NAS — and you’ll get a free diagnostic and a fixed quote before any work.