>re: "who would buy a sparq when an ide internal drive is $300 or less and the medium per gig is like 1/100th the price?"
Let me tell you why I bought a Sparq (I am not a Syquest investor, past or present).
I do system upgrades, installations and repairs. There are TONS of times when you need to back up the entire contents of a hard drive, for any of sixty million reasons. And, if you work on a whole bunch of sytems, laptops, desktops, 386's to Pentiums, you need a way of doing it that doesn't require opening the case or adding any cards to the card cage (which notebooks don't even have), and which doesn not require making any permanent changes to the software configuration (e.g. no software installation, e.g. something like Guest or Visit).
The only viable contenders are Iomega and Syquest. Tape is completely unreliable and out of the question. Zip is too small. It boils down to Jaz, Sparq or Syjet. Jaz is the best of these products, granted, BUT IOMEGA DOES NOT MAKE A PARALLEL PORT JAZ DRIVE ! Sorry, I can't use a Jaz on just any system without adding hardware and changing the software configuration of the computer. That leaves SyJet and Sparq. Sparq is simply much more cost effective.
That's why I bought a Sparq.
I'd hate to see the company cease to exist, but clearly there are major problems. It's possible that the only way out of this, at this point, it a bankruptcy in which BOTH current management and current stockholders (sorry, this means PRIMARILY those who got the diluted shares) are flushed, and the company emerges with a reasonable amount of stock (initially owned by the creditors), no warranty liability on old product (that is another thing that could get flushed in a bankruptcy) and all-new management. Then you might have a smaller, soundly financed company to go forward and sink or swim with one or two reasonable products (SparQ and Syjet).
As to whether either or both of these are technically viable, I can't say, I own one SparQ drive and use another, and so far I have not had any problems, but the amount of use is small and infrequent.
I have, however, noticed that some of the Sparq cartridges seem to have much higher vibration levels than others, which I presume is a rotational balance issue.
Regards,
Barry Watzman |
