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Imagine ... your hard drive is filling up fast, but you can't stand the thought of trashing anything that's out there now. There are lots of new hard drives that are getting cheaper daily and would do the trick nicely, but they're a little more than you had planned.
You know it is incredibly convenient to be able to carry around large chunks of storage space, swapping large amounts of data with co-workers and friends. Removable cartridge technology is also a lot cheaper than buying a new hard drive every six months. Happily, there are two new 3.5" cartridge hard drive systems from Iomega and Syquest that are priced so low you can get 1 gigabyte of storage space for under $340.
Iomega Corporation's Zip Drive is a small, light (1 lb.) 100MB removable cartridge hard drive system priced at a modest $199.95 (that's $200 to you an me). 25MB carts will be available for $9.95 and 100MB cartridges come in at $19.95 each. It clocks in at 29 milliseconds average access time (9 milliseconds slower than current Syquest technology) and lists a sustained transfer rate of up to 1.25MB per second. That's comparable to optical drive technology with a considerably cheaper price tag.
So far so good. But when you consider Syquest is promising the imminent release of a 135MB cartridge hard drive system for the same price, larger capacity cartridges for the same price, AND a average access time around 15.5 milliseconds FASTER, you start to wonder if Iomega isn't about to get beat coming out of the gate.
Syquest Technology, Inc. promises their EZ135 (code-named Roadrunner) to the PC market by June, and availability for Macs is scheduled for July 1995. The PC version will be an IDE device and the Mac version will be SCSI-2. The base unit will be about the same size as the Zip drive and weigh a couple of pounds more (Syquest isn't even sure of this one yet!) It boasts a sustained data transfer rate of 2.5MB per second (twice as fast as Iomega's Zip) and an average access time of 13.5 milliseconds -- that beats current Syquest drives and optical drives by a huge margin. The only drawback is that the new EZ135 will not support Syquest's existing 105 and 270MB 3.5" cartridges. Bummer.
Are these just smaller versions of the 5.25" cartridge hard drive I have now? Well, actually yes. The mechanism will read/write these new 3.5" cartridges in the same way. They both use the same hard drive technology that all Syquest and Bernoulli offerings have had since the beginning. While not nearly as reliable and stable as magneto optical technology, Syquest and Iomega's removable hard drive technology proves to be much cheaper and that can translate into much more storage space for your dollar. In my opinion, the Zip Drive and EZ135's only two advances are a much lower price tag and a much smaller form-factor. These suckers are small! Both the Zip drive and the EZ135 are about the size of a small paperback and weigh in at a couple of pounds! That means if a client or co-worker doesn't have a Zip drive, you can bring yours along without having to make much room in your briefcase.
Are these drives more stable or reliable than the larger format removables? Not really. The fact that they're smaller and more compact might make them a little less likely to damage platter surfaces and such when dropped. But that won't save you from static charges due to impacts, etc. The fact remains: if you're prone to dropping data cartridges, these still aren't good candidates.
Because the technology is the same as in the 5.25" removable magnetic media, so your data can still be lost to a nasty spill (or a couple of semi-nasty ones). The shelf life on the new 3.5" cartridges is rated at around 10 years. Even so, I wouldn't trust them to mission-critical and/or archival data that cannot be replaced. While magneto optical cartridges are more stable, that stability comes at a price. More than twice the price! Still, I'd go to the "super-duper" reliable (that's an industry term) DAT tape for backup purposes and burn a CD for permanent archival data.
Iomega's Zip Drive should be available right now and Syquest's EZ135 will be out in July! Both are great first offerings in a market that I'm sure will heat up in the months to come.
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