All: New ZIP model is out
Last night, I went to the local Egghead dealer up here in Burlington, MA to buy a ZIP SCSI Insider drive. I've bought four drives in the past and all of them have been 5.25" form factor (not disk size but overall dimensions). To my surprise, the one I bought last night ($199 - rebate still applies) will install to *both* 3.5" or 5.25" drive bay. The drive looks exactly like the ones OEM (HP, PB/NEC) ship with their PCs except its not computer grey but IO purple/blue. It even has the weird looking manual eject hole so you can insert a paper clip if you ZIP disk gets stuck inside the drive.
The new 3.5" drive SCSI features have been changed where the user is now offered a wide range of configuration settings. The older SCSI models could be configured only for SCSI ID#4,5,6. This model supports SCSI ID#0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 which leads to an interesting idea on whether the drive is capable of booting on PCs. I haven't tried it yet but since almost all SCSI boards allow booting off of a SCSI#0 device the ZIP should boot without any problems. If anyone would like more details on this product before he or she considers buying one I would be glad to email you with a review on the product.
Going back on previous posts I found someone posted on 9-23-96
an IO press release that mentioned the company announces a new internal 3.5" SCSI Zip drive. I just wasn't expecting the time to market for this product to be so quick. With the recent release of the 3.5" SCSI ZIP I would imagine that the 3.5" IDE ZIP for retail purchase will make its debut prior to Christmas if not sooner. OR Tech and Syquest could learn a thing or two from IO's strategy of releasing new products in a timely manner in order to *broaden* consumer demand and ultimately help make ZIP become the standard high capacity floppy drive.
In the store shelves I also noticed the new Ditto 2GB Tape Backup, PCMCIA Card for Laptops to use Zip with Systemsoft Card Services support and the 3 hour battery backpack for Zip.
Hyun |
