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IOMega Bernoulli Box 10MB

IOMega was a company famous of their Zip and JAZ drives, which allowed to store large amounts of data on a portable media. However, they haven't started with ZIP - the first IOMega product was called Bernoulli Box. Released in 1983, the Bernoulli box was a high-capacity magnetic drive with removable disk cartridges. It was 8-inch and allowed to store 10MB of data on an elastic platter in hardened cartridge. The principle of operation was revolutionary as of its time - instead of heads having constant contact with a disc, the Bernoulli disks used a cushion of air to maintain head right above the surface. This phenomenon, working on Bernoulli's principle, gave the name to the drive. The heads were loadable, and while hard drives used a contact heads with servo motors, Bernoulli drive used flying heads with voice coil mechanism, giving better tracking precision by using feedback to position the head over track.
After 10MB, a 20MB Bernoulli drives have been manufactured, later there were larger disks and drives. In 1987 a Bernoulli Box II has been made, later even with smaller media dimensions, in 5.25" form factor. The technology had a few drawbacks - first, it was extremely sensitive to dust particles. The foil disc itself was kept in enclosed cartridge, while the drive had a fan, but not only for cooling - it was used to maintain positive air pressure inside drive's casing making all dust particles go outside. To avoid injecting dust into the casing, the fan was equipped with special replaceable filter. The filter was not perfect, but head was immune to some smaller particles. However, every now and then, it was needed to clean heads. It was done using a special cleaning cartridge which was placed in a drive and the handle had to be manually moved a few (tens) of times.
This technology was expensive - such drive's cost was like a cost of a complete PC with a hard drive, and cartridges were expensive too, but the reliability, speed of operation and replaceable cartridges was a huge advantage when portability was a key factor, e.g. in backup purposes, CAD and publishing or archiving. IOMega released other mass storage products: ZIP and JAZ drives, Ditto tape drive and even "pocket floppy" or CD-RW drives as well as numerous external hard drives and drive arrays. In 2008 they were acquired by EMC, later Lenovo/EMC.