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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John P. Henrie who wrote (46275)	1/30/1998 1:20:00 AM
From: Philip J. Davis	Respond to of 58324

An email I sent to Hiawatha Brey in response to her article in the Boston Globe: boston.com >>Hiawatha, I read your article with interest since I invest in Iomega. I own a Zip drive and a Jaz drive. In regards to your recommendation of the SyQuest drives over Iomega, I point out several aspects of the Zip and Jaz drives that I think merit additional consideration by you. Your article doesn't address data-transfer performance of other versions of the Zip drive. Not all Zip drives use the parallel port as it's computer interface. There are, additionally, SCSI (external and internal) and IDE (internal) Zip drives. These Zip drives are much faster than the parallel port version. For example, if you look at Iomega's own performance data at: Parallel port iomega.com SCSI iomega.com IDE iomega.com you can see that the SCSI and IDE Zip drives are much faster, even than the Superdisk drive, whose performance data, while not published by Imation (I couldn't find it), can only achieve an average transfer rate of only 500K/sec. Also, as you had mentioned in your article, Iomega has sold over 12 million drives. Especially now, with the ubiquity of the Zip drive, compatibility with a large installed base of 12 million drives makes the Zip more attractive, Vs the Superdisk's installed base of only 1.4 million drives. Before I purchased the Zip drive, I bought an EZ135 SyQuest. I bought the SyQuest drive because, like the Superdisk, the EZ135 was faster than the parallel port Zip and had 35% more capacity. Nevertheless, I soon realized that while the SyQuest drive performed admirably, it lacked greatly in the fact that so few people had them. The installed base was and still is puny. I don't know anyone personally that owns an EZ135 drive. The Iomega Jaz drive uses a SCSI 2 interface. The Sparq external parallel port drive, while 50% cheaper, is 76% slower than the Jaz drive. Here too, the Jaz drive has a much larger installed base of drives. Clearly, the Iomega Jaz drive, while more expensive, delivers near-hard drive performance. Iomega Jaz iomega.com Average Transfer Rate of 5.4MB/sec SyQuest Sparq Parallel Port syquest.com Transfer Rate limited by parallel port to 1.25MB/sec Sincerely, Philip J. Davis<<