Bernoulli Box

The original Bernoulli Box "Alpha-10" is a 10megabyte (MB) removable disk drive that spins a disk made of PET film at about 1500 rpm, 1μm above a read-write head. Utilizing Bernoulli's principle, the rotation of the disk pulls the flexible disk media down towards the read/write head, and will continue to do so for as long as the disk is spinning. This was in an attempt to make the Bernoulli drive more reliable than a contemporaneous hard disk drive, since a head crash is made physically impossible: should the disk stop spinning for any reason, it immediately pulls away from the read/write head, preventing damage. The Bernoulli Box was released in capacities of 10MB and, later, 20MB, and its cartridges measure , Bernoulli Box II drives were sold as either internal units which fit into standard 5¼-inch drive bays, or as external units, with either one or two drives within a self-contained enclosure, similar to the original Bernoulli Box, and which connected to the host computer via the external SCSI connector. All versions of the Bernoulli Box II use a SCSI interface, but external drives can also be converted for use with a parallel port interface using a special adapter. Cartridges for both the original Bernoulli Box, as well as the Bernoulli Box II, have a physical switch on them, analogous to that of a standard 3½-inch floppy disk, in order to enable and disable write protection. ==Reception==

By 1986 Iomega had reportedly sold more than 70,000 Bernoulli Boxes, and more than one million $80 cartridges for them. PC Magazine in 1984 stated that the Bernoulli Box "... combines the advantages of [standard] floppy- and hard-disk systems without their drawbacks." It reported no software-compatibility problems and cited the box's durable design. Bruce Webster of BYTE wrote favorably of the peripheral in February 1986, reporting that "I have not had a single glitch or lost file" in nine months of constant use. ==Successors==

Iomega's later removable-storage products such as the Zip drive and Jaz and Rev removable hard disks did not use the Bernoulli technology. ==References==