March 16, 1998
The Best Way to Store Data
Syquest has a new external storage drive that's
every bit as good as Iomega's Zip drive, and a lot
cheaper.
Michael J. Himowitz
very time I upload a "roll" of photos from my digital
camera to my PC, I have 25 fewer megabytes of hard
disk space to work with. Since I'm an inveterate pack
rat--I hate to throw any picture away, particularly when there's
no negative--my hard drive is getting pretty crowded.
Sound familiar? If your hard disk is filling up, you need a
high-capacity removable drive. In fact, you may already have
one--many new PCs come with Iomega Zip drives that store
100 megabytes of data on disks not much larger than floppies.
Millions of people with older computers have plugged in external
Zips to relieve the overcrowding.
Now there's something even
better than the Zip--Syquest's
incredible new Sparq drive. At
$199, it's priced about the same
as a Zip drive. But with Sparq,
you get a drive that stores
information on a disk that holds an entire gigabyte (the equivalent
of 1,000 novels)--that's ten times the capacity of a Zip disk. You
get one disk with the unit; additional disks are $40 apiece or
three for $99. Iomega has a product called Jazz that stores just
as much data as the Sparq, but it costs almost twice as much.
The Sparq drive comes in two versions--an internal model that
slides into an open bay inside your machine and connects to the
circuitboard that controls your hard disk, and an external model
that plugs into your printer port. The internal drive is much faster,
but you'll have to open up your PC to install it. The external
drive is slower, but you can move it from one computer to
another with minimal fuss. It's great if you have to bring home a
lot of data from the office.
I tried out the external Sparq, a five-by-seven-inch black box
that, on its side, squeezes into as little as two inches of desktop
space. Installation's a breeze. To hook it up, you run a cable
from the Sparq to your printer port. You can still use your
printer--just plug its cable into the back of the drive.
The Sparq is the fastest gadget I've ever plugged into a parallel
port. It copied a 133-megabyte folder of graphics from my hard
drive in a shade over three minutes. That's flying. Sparq's
installation disk also has a program from Novastor that
compresses the data on your hard drive and transfers it to one or
more Sparq disks.
Overall, Syquest's Sparq beats Iomega's Zip in price and
performance. Still, if you often travel with lots of data, remember
that the Zip drive does retain one advantage--so many people
have Zip drives that you can often just carry a Zip disk and leave
the drive at home. Sparq doesn't have that ubiquity. Still, it's so
good you may not mind carrying around the 1.5-pound drive.
For information, try www.syquest.com on the Web, or call
800-245-2278 or 510-226-4000. |
