"...we very much like the SuperDisk drive. If you're willing to take a chance with an emerging format, this drive is a wise investment."
Windows Magazine
February 1998, page 177.
winmag.com
SuperDisk Does Super Duty
-- by James E. Powell
Imation isn't the first company to produce a high-capacity, removable-storage device that uses the new 120MB LS-120 disks, but its patience has paid off in a product that offers solid performance. Despite using a parallel port connection, Imation's SuperDisk drive is very fast, thanks to special acceleration software that works remarkably well.
The Imation SuperDisk LS-120 drive, supported by a small group of vendors pushing to make the 120MB disk the next standard in portable storage, writes to and reads conventional 3.5-inch disks (both 720KB and 1.44MB) as well as LS-120 disks. In fact, the LS-120 disk looks and feels so much like conventional 3.5-inch disks that we wish Imation had added a visual clue to distinguish it from the older disks-perhaps a colored stripe on the side of the case.
That complaint aside, the drive is quite exceptional because of its Performance Accelerator software (for Windows 95 only). I attached the SuperDisk drive to our benchmark system, a Dell Dimension XPS M233s with only ECP (extended capabilities port) support on the parallel port. Without Performance Accelerator installed, I copied 120MB worth of files (1,051 files among 62 folders) from our very fast Maxtor DiamondMax 2160 hard drive to an LS-120 disk in 24 minutes, 18 seconds. Running the same test on an HP Pavilion 8190 with built-in support for the faster EPP (enhanced parallel port) standard actually took 12 seconds longer. Continuing our tests on the Dell, it took 6 minutes, 39 seconds to delete those files. I then installed and enabled Performance Accelerator (it can be toggled on and off), copied the files in 16 minutes, 4 seconds (a 34 percent time savings) and deleted the files in 10 seconds.
The Performance Accelerator caching program uses space on your hard disk as its holding tank for files until they can be copied to the SuperDisk. In effect, when you copy files to the SuperDisk, you're actually copying them to your hard drive. Then, as system activity permits, the files are copied to the SuperDisk. If that sounds like extra work, it is; but in the end, it's a very efficient method for giving you back control while the file activity goes on in the background.
Performance Accelerator also intercepts file requests to the SuperDisk drive and checks the hard drive first, as it should, to see if the file exists there. That way, there's no chance that your program will access an out-of-date file on the SuperDisk when a newer version is sitting in the hard disk cache. For efficiency, the program accumulates read and write requests-which explains the dramatic difference in the Delete benchmark.
If you try to close down Windows 95 or eject the disk before the data on your hard drive has been copied to the SuperDisk, a window pops up and displays a progress indicator. When copying is complete, the system either shuts down or ejects the disk.
It's unlikely that you'll tax your SuperDisk drive the way we did ours. Such disks are better suited for use as miniature hard drives for reading and writing smaller files. Neither the LS-120 disks nor Iomega's Zip disks are appropriate for playing back large multimedia files, simply because their performance will never rival a hard disk's, and because the parallel port has inherent throughput limitations. Even so, we were pleased that the Performance Accelerator worked so well.
Nevertheless, there are some limitations to the SuperDisk. It's not as rugged as the Iomega Zip or Avatar Shark drives. In addition, the unit is clearly designed for desktop operation in the horizontal position-not for briefcase portability.
We would also have preferred a power switch on the drive. And although the SuperDisk includes parallel-port pass-through, you can't print through the drive while you're reading or writing, a limitation shared by all similarly equipped devices.
Vendors supporting the LS-120 disk face an uphill climb: SuperDisk has no price advantage. At $199, it's the same price as our WinList favorite, the Avatar Shark 250 mobile hard drive (which offers more than twice the LS-120's storage capacity on its disks). In addition, it costs about $50 more than an Iomega Zip drive (which has an installed base of more than 10 million units). The cost per megabyte for all three media, however, is approximately the same: 15 cents for the SuperDisk and Zip disks, and a penny more for the Shark. But competition from a new 200MB storage format introduced by Sony should lower drive and media prices this year.
The SuperDisk also faces a formidable challenge from the SyQuest SparQ. For the same price, the SparQ offers 1GB of storage space. The Sparq, however, can't read from or write to standard floppy disks.
Because the Avatar Shark 250 offers greater capacity for the same price as the SuperDisk, the Shark remains our WinList choice. However, we very much like the SuperDisk drive. If you're willing to take a chance with an emerging format, this drive is a wise investment.
Imation SuperDisk
Bottom Line: Good performance from an external storage drive
Price: $199
Pros: Performance
Cons: Smaller capacity than the Avatar Shark 250
Strongest Rival: Avatar Shark 250
Imation Corp.
888-466-3456, 612-704-4000
Winfo #811
c 1998 Windows Magazine
February 1998, page 177. |
