Marie, I presume you are talking about the Phoenix announcement regarding support for ATAPI compliant removable disk drives as boot devices.
The Zip internal drives come in two types, ATAPI and SCSI. Jaz, so far, comes only in SCSI.
So the Zip will be supported as a boot device in the new Phoenix BIOS. So will MO, LS-120 and what have you.
I see that there were two press announcements on this subject, one from Iomega, and the other from Compaq and Phoenix. The Iomega release (of course) doesn't mention that the new Phoenix BIOS will support booting from all these other devices in addition to Zip. And the Phoenix announcement doesn't mention that their main competitor, AMI, will also support these devices as boot drives.
Basically, what it all means is that very soon, most new computers will be able to boot from ANY type of ATAPI device, including hard disks, LS-120, MO, CD-ROM, DVD and so on. It will also be possible to upgrade some existing computers to add this support. Overall, this is a good thing, but I don't see it as an advantage for any particular player in the removable storage business.
- Allen Murdock |
