From Today's Washington Post Fast Forward Magazine:
WIDE OPEN SPACE
Always running out of space on your hard drive? Suspect you need to do something about
backing up your data?
A Zip Drive might be right for you. And it might not.
Sexy removable STORAGE sounds like an oxymoron, and a particularly moronic one at that. But
Iomega's Zip Drive -- a $200 blue box, weighing in at only a pound and storing data on $20, 100-
megabyte disks -- meets that description. It's cheap, relatively fast and becoming the leader in
this emerging product category. But it's not the solution to all storage woes. The best cure for an
overloaded hard drive may still be...a new drive.
The best reasons for getting a Zip drive are for backing up your machine or moving large
amounts of data between two machines. The unit's light weight makes it a snap to tote around,
and Iomega's "guest" program makes it easy to connect Zip drives temporarily to other people's
machines. That's an important consideration, as Zip drives are still a long way from ubiquity (but
an increasing number of computer manufacturers, including Hewlett-Packard and Mac cloners
Power Computing, now offer internal Zip drives).
If you want to use a Zip drive as an adjunct to a maxed-out hard drive, you should keep in mind
the Zip's speed limits. It runs slower than a hard drive, but faster than a floppy disk or a CD-
ROM. It's swift enough to run most personal-productivity applications -- if you have the SCSI
(Small Computer Systems Interface) version, standard for Macs and an option on PCs, you can
even boot your machine off a Zip disk. So the Zip is good for, say, storing those space-hogging
files many "coffee-table" CD-ROMs insist on installing, but we don't recommend using the Zip for
running games or other disk-abusing applications -- Web browsers being a notorious example.
If you only want more disk space, simply adding another hard drive is probably a better option.
Fast, one-gigabyte-plus internal hard drives now sell for under $500; external models are easier
to install but can cost from $50 to $100 extra, depending on capacity and performance.
Finally, a word about the Zip's competitor, SyQuest's $200, 135-megabyte EZ135 drive: Don't.
Attempts to install it on two PCs were quasi-catastrophic, involving editing of config.sys files and
forced reassignment of drive letters by SyQuest's DOS-only installer (i.e., none of our CD-ROMs
worked afterwards!). The hefty EZ135, twice as heavy as the Zip, does run faster, but for most
data transfers you're not likely to notice; when you get to truly large files, at 10 megs and up,
you'll be twiddling your thumbs with either drive. At press time SyQuest unveiled the $300
EZFlyer 230 drive, which uses 230 meg disks and weighs only a pound and a half (not counting
the power brick); it may prove to be a better pick for power users. ROB PEGORARO
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Not much new in this article, but I found it interesting that Mr. Pegoraro recommends a $500
one-gigabyte-plus internal hard drive for adding more disk space and completely overlooks
Iomega's Jazz drive as an alternative.
Another news brief in the Washington Post's New Brief section stated that Power Computing won
a contract for 3,000 of its computers by Lockheed Martin Astronautics. Power Computing said
the contract -- for which Apple bid unseccessfully -- is the largest single purchase of Macintosh-
compatible machines. I wonder if Power Computings inclusion of Zip drives on their machines
had anything to do with Lockheed's selection.
B.K. |
