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Non-Tech : The New Iomega '2000' Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Colvin who wrote (3506)	11/24/1999 10:49:00 PM
From: FuzzFace	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5023

<The CD-RW does not have the capacity to perform such a back up and, again, is way too slow!> I use my CD-RW drive to keep a permanent archive copy of all my Drive Image PQI files. They are created on the HD, but backed up to CD-R (not RW, which as you noted, would be useless in a restore situation since there is no DOS CD-RW driver.) But what I'm getting at is, I've restored entire partitions from the CD-R PQI backup in DOS mode many times. The DOS boot must load a generic CDROM driver that works for your CD-R, but they are easy to find. I'll send you mine if you want. CD-R restores take about twice as long as from HD, but are much faster than from Zip. So I keep the last 3 backups on HD, then migrate them to CD-R. Costs a buck a CD-R blank. 4 months ago when I bought the drive, I bought 50 CD-R blanks and 10 CD-RW blanks. I now have about 10 unused blanks of each. Even after all this time thinking about it, I don't have any good use for CD-RW disks, since any CDROM drive that I put one in must be "Multi-Read" capable. The vast majority of legacy CDROM drives do not have this feature, and so can't read CD-RWs. And no DVD-RAM I've seen will write CD-RW. What a waste. BTW, formatting CD-RW's in a certain way (they all have the option now, but I can't remember what it's called) enables files to be dragged and dropped onto the CD-RW disk just like a normal disk. Very little hassle (except for the initial formating which is slower than the rewrite speed on my machine for some reason), and reasonably fast (mine is 4x rewrite speed) once it gets going. But there is a >15 second (probably hardware dependant) fixed time lag for it to get going that makes it seem slow. For small files almost all the time is in the lag, none in actual data movement. Regards Ed

To: David Colvin who wrote (3506)	11/26/1999 3:36:00 PM
From: Bobo Bear	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5023

<<<I can certainly understand your reasoning about CD-RW vs. Zip drives. However, I feel that these products complement each other more often than compete with each other.>>> I disagree that Zip and CD-RW complement each other. In the article on CD-RW growth, see below link, 40% of HP Pavillion's sold in October came with a CD-RW drive. If you are an IOM investor you have to ask yourself what percentage of those computers also went out the door with a Zip? My feelings tell me it was a very small percentage. The article contain many items that suggest CD-RW is taking over the removable storage market. Near the end it mentioned Phillips now ships 1 million CD-RW drives a month. I think 1 million a month has been the peak in Zip shipments. So how many CD-RWs did HP or Sony ship? So it is obvious to me sometime in 1999 CD-RW shipments overtook Zip shipments, and is now way ahead. And what about this paragraph, "In July, only 1.7 percent of PCs sold at retail came with CD-RW drives, according to market researcher PC Data. The number had more than doubled to 3.8 percent in August and climbed to 7.8 percent and 19 percent, respectively, in September and October." From 1.7% to 19% in only 4 months! Talk about growth. I don't believe many of those computers also came with a Zip. Who knows maybe all those CR-RW computers also included a Zip drive. I haven't been inside a computer shop for 6 months now, so I don't know if CD-RW is displacing Zip. If you are an IOM investor its a question you better get the answer too. IMHO, CD-RW is rapidly taking over. I would not be surprised to see IOM report a large drop in Zip revenues one of the next upcoming quarters. yahoo.cnet.com