It's not too long since we last met the Iomega Rev drive, and we were impressed enough to give the 35GB version our backing, albeit with caveats over pricing, earlier this year.

The Rev is a storage solution that's available in both internal and external guises. Its selling point is that it marries up facets of hard drive technology in small cartridges that can be taken off-site or used as part of a backup programme, in the same manner as a tape drive solution.

This newly launched 70GB incarnation hasn't actually moved the technology on particularly, but the headline act is clearly the doubling of storage capacity. In fact, using the compression software that Iomega includes, it's possible to get up to 140GB onto a single cartridge, depending on the type of data. That's not to be sneezed at, and it offers teasing possibilities for home users along with businesses of pretty much all sizes.

It's the USB 2.0 external device we're testing here, but various connectivity choices are available. However, the USB 2.0 unit is sadly still not automatically plug and play compatible, with each machine you plug the Rev into needing a one-time small software installation to get it running. Still, that's a simple if inconvenient job, and once installed you can use the drive in various ways.

Once you insert a cartridge, you can use it in the same way you would a hard drive: the Rev is attributed a drive letter and you can drag and drop files to your heart's content. It's slower than a hard drive, naturally, and while it also lacks the pace of a good optical device, it does work faster than the tape-based solutions that many people will be looking to replace. We didn't manage to match the 30MB per second speeds that Iomega boasts, instead getting more like 15-17MB. It was surprisingly quiet while it went about its work, though.

There's also that capacity to consider, and the sheer convenience of the Rev. Iomega will sell you products that house several Rev drives, for you to automate a backup strategy (helped enormously by the included Retrospect Express software), and even attached to a single machine there are clear advantages in writing to media that would barely cover half a credit card in physical size, and then taking large quantities of files on the move.

Plus there's a neat feature whereby you can, using the provided software, make a recovery CD for your system which will give you quick access to the contents of the Rev in the event of disaster, without you having to reinstall Windows.

But here's that hurdle again. There's no getting away from it, the price tag is going to be an issue for many. Ironically, the larger the enterprise, the better value the Rev looks: in large IT infrastructures it competes well with high capacity backup solutions where sizeable amounts of valuable data need to be kept safe or moved around.

As you go down the food chain, though, the value for money question becomes more pertinent: certainly some of the small businesses we quizzed saw much better value in using full hard drives in external enclosures and then rotating them where required.

And given that the cost of a Rev drive with an extra 70GB cartridge will take you to around the £400 mark (with extra cartridges selling for over £60 apiece), you can't help but see their point. A 250GB hard drive now comes in at south of £100, while a good enclosure is £30-ish. Two of those would offer so much more storage than the Rev, with only a slight convenience compromise for the more modest user.

No question, though, that the Rev 70 is an excellent piece of hardware that continues Iomega's recent resurgence. For some larger organisations we can see this being an extremely worthwhile choice, and any user who can afford it will appreciate their purchase.

Even previous Rev owners have incentive to upgrade, thanks to backwards compatibility with 35GB cartridges (although 70GB cartridges can't be read in 35GB drives). Yet the tighter the budget, and the smaller the user base, the harder it is to justify the asking price of the Rev. It's quality alright, but quality with a price consideration to match.

There's little doubting the quality of the hardware, and the added convenience of the extra storage capacity this time round is hard to fault. But cost remains a problem.