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

To: dale velkovitz who wrote (49839)	3/12/1998 10:22:00 PM
From: Gmoney	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 58324

PC World reviews the Jaz2 and the ORB drive The new PC World has a review of the Jaz2 and the ORB drive. They gave a very positive review of the Jaz2 and interestingly enough Castlewood could not provide an ORB drive for testing in time for the review. PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak announced over 2 weeks ago that the ORB is going to destroy Iomega yet PC World wasnt even provided with a unit to review. I wonder what Dvorak based his opinion on. pcworld.com excerpts: >>>>Removable Feast: New Jaz and Orb Drives When you work with massive multimedia files, removable-media storage drives like the 100MB Iomega Zip and the 230MB SyQuest EZ-Flyer seem woefully inadequate. Even drives such as the original 1GB Iomega Jaz and SyQuest's 1.5GB SyJet often fail to meet your archival needs with the one or two disks they bundle. But two new drives that bump capacities up to 2GB per disk have arrived--Iomega's Jaz 2GB and the 2.16GB Orb from Castlewood Systems. On the outside, the Jaz 2GB looks just like its predecessor, but under the hood it delivers higher performance, according to my tests of a shipping unit. Whereas the original Jaz drive had an average data transfer rate of 5.4 megabytes per second, the 2GB model increases this rate to 7.4 MBps. Normally, a removable drive reads too slowly to play video well, but I could run video clips directly from the 2GB Jaz cartridge with only minor hiccups. <<<< >>>>Easy Install My testing also showed that Iomega isn't kidding when it says you can back up 2GB of data in 20 minutes. Installing the Jaz was quick work. The external SCSI model I used comes with a cable to plug into your PC's Ultra SCSI adapter. <<<<< >>>>> The Competition On paper, Castlewood Systems' new Orb drive sounds like a serious competitor to the Jaz 2GB, but the vendor could not give us a unit in time for this review. Castlewood says the Orb, which should be available in parallel port and internal IDE versions by the time you read this, stores 2.16GB on 3.5-inch removable cartridges and reaches a maximum data transfer rate of 12.2MBps. An external SCSI model ships in May. All three Orb drives will sell for $199. Individual cartridges will cost only $30--much less than other removable-storage drives. If the Orb performs well, it will be a worthy competitor in the removable-media storage market. <<<<< GARY