The following is from the Nov. 13th issue of the WSJ online edition. Looks like Mr. Mossberg had a few troubles along the way to Sparqsville! I think this would give one pause before rushing out to CompUSA or Computer City to buy one of these "rushed to market" drives. Mel
Sparq Boosts PC's Disk Space,
But Don't Rush to Buy It Yet
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
ONE OF THE BEST computer products to come along in recent years has been the Zip drive from Iomega. This is a $149 add-on disk drive that plugs into the back of your PC and lets you use special disks that are about the size of a floppy, but hold 70 times as much material -- 100 megabytes. When it first came out in April 1995, I recommended it highly. Now, it has become a standard, and is an option on many new PCs.
Iomega's archrival, SyQuest Technology, had failed to come up with a popular Zip-killer, but now it has a product that looks like it might do the trick. It's called the Sparq drive, and is being launched this month with splashy, edgy ads. The $199 price is a bit higher than the basic Zip drive, but exactly the same as the new Zip Plus drive. That's a slightly fancier model Iomega is introducing that has a few minor new features, such as an on/off switch, but no added capacity.
The black Sparq drive looks a lot like the purple Zip drive. But each of the new pocket-size Sparq disks it uses holds a whole gigabyte of information, or more than a thousand megabytes -- 10 times as much as a Zip disk. And these disks cost only about $33 each. That's about twice as much as a $15 Zip disk, for 10 times the capacity. One disk is included with the Sparq drive.
This could be a great boon for consumers with Windows PCs (there's no Mac version) and small hard disks. It would give them unlimited extra capacity for all of today's bloated programs, which can be run right off the Sparq drive. And it is also a cheap way to store bulky files like captured Web sites, digital pictures or video and audio clips.
FOR PEOPLE with the new, larger multigigabyte hard disks, the Sparq is a more cost-effective way than the Zip to perform backups. Backing up three gigabytes of data with a Sparq drive takes just three disks costing $99, versus 30 Zip disks costing $450.
So, it's too bad I can't advise most people to run out later this month and snatch up a Sparq drive when they appear in stores. After a few days of testing the Sparq drive on two different Windows 95 PCs, I've concluded that the drive -- and its accompanying software and manuals -- has too many rough edges and missing elements, at least in the initial production run, to make it a good choice for average, nontechnical PC owners.
Don't get me wrong. The Sparq drive does work. In my tests, I eventually got one to perform as advertised. I copied masses of files to and from the Sparq easily, played huge video clips directly from the drive, and launched programs from it just fine. Though it plugs into the printer port, like a Zip drive, the Sparq drive includes an alternate plug for a printer, and I was able to print just fine using it. But there were lots of hassles along the way.
For that reason, I advise anybody who's not a techie to wait a few months before buying a Sparq drive. SyQuest says it's fixing these problems, and I'd wait until enough time has passed for it to do so.
The first Sparq drive SyQuest sent me for review simply wouldn't install on my PC, even though it was supposedly a production unit, not a prototype. When I informed SyQuest's technicians, they found a software defect, which was remedied in a second drive they delivered. This one installed properly on my desktop PC, as well as on a laptop. SyQuest assures me that none of the Sparq drives being sent to stores will have the bad software I encountered.
BUT EVEN the second, working drive had problems. The installation software is an ancient-looking DOS program that will be pretty shocking to many Windows users. And to fully install the drive, you need to run a second set-up program. This isn't obvious, and there's no clear message saying you're done. The only way you can tell is to look for an icon representing the Sparq drive. But, confusingly, it isn't labeled Sparq, just "removable disk," and SyQuest doesn't explain this. The set-up program also installs a bunch of Sparq drive utilities with a terrible, inexplicable user interface, and once again, there's no explanation.
In fact, the instructions are completely inadequate. The included software and skimpy manuals spend much more time on hype than on helping users. There's plenty of information about some superfluous free software that's included, and about a dumb contest SyQuest is staging for people who want to design labels for their Sparq disk containers. But, other than a good poster-size guide to physically connecting the drive, there's really no documentation for actually using it.
I noticed a few other problems. The electrical adapter is heavy and has a cord that's too short to let the drive sit comfortably atop a minitower PC. SyQuest is planning to replace this with a better adapter, which is another reason to wait before buying.
I also found that the Sparq drive sometimes made a noisy spinning sound, even when it wasn't being accessed, and when I tried to look at its contents during one of these moments, it crashed my PC. Furthermore, when you install the Sparq, it can change the identification letter for your CD-ROM drive, which can confuse both users and software.
But for these flaws, the Sparq could be a great product -- even better than the Zip drive. SyQuest promises that most of the glitches will be fixed in the coming weeks and months, and I see no reason to doubt the company. But I also see no reason for consumers to buy the Sparq before it's really ready. |
