Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Non-Tech : Iomega Thread without Iomega -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Philip J. Davis who wrote (5085)	12/12/1998 6:31:00 PM
From: s. bateh	Respond to of 10072

I sent him an email as well....when he starts the "get out now before 4 a share next year" and does not mention the clik or usb etc. and only harps on vapor product and does not compare media costs, I think he is either ignorant on tech. or just wants to bash iom. The only thing that has changed from his last stroy is that IOMEGA has gotten better, new product, cut costs etc. etc. In fact i would of thought he would of wrote a good article. Remember last time he wrote right before the usb and zip250 came out and he was neutral....Now new product is out, sony comes out with less than a bang, syqt is out and no other competition....and he writes a bad article!!! I think he is short this one big time or he is just clueless.....or both

To: Philip J. Davis who wrote (5085)	12/13/1998 4:01:00 PM
From: XOsDaWAY2GO	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10072

>>>J. Michael Pinson from MarketMavensReport<<< What do you think this will do to IOM tomorrow morning?

To: Philip J. Davis who wrote (5085)	12/14/1998 1:02:00 AM
From: FuzzFace	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10072

Philip, here's an email I sent to J. Michael Pinson from MarketMavensReport.com. Your well written response inspired me to add my 2 cents on docking bays. ================================================================= Dear Mr. Pinson, I found your article on Iomega interesting. tfc.com Much of what you say is true, but the part about dockable hard drives ignores some real issues. Being the owner of a Zip 100 and five harddrive docking bays which work like the HiVal ones you described, I believe that corporate America would probably not go for the dockable harddrive (DHD) solution over Zip100 (or any other truly removable disk.) I offer the following reasons based on my experience. 1. Master vs. Slave - it's those pesky jumpers. I solved most of the problem by reconfiguring my home and work PCs - I set all DHDs as slaves. It is not an intuitive solution and some say I'm sacrificing performance (though I can't see how). Unfortunately, my work-PC's master HD must be re-jumpered whenever I forget and leave the DHD at home. 2. Old BIOSes - I also must fiddle with my 2 year old work PC BIOS to tell it not to expect a HD if I leave the DHD at home. Newer BIOS's, like my home PC's 1 year old BIOS, don't have that problem. Also, older BIOSes can't deal with HD sizes greater than 2GB and 8GB, depending on just how ancient it is. Then there's that 512MB limit from the stone age - 4 years ago. Compounding the configuration difficulties is the limitation of 2 HDs with IDE, or 4 HDs with EIDE, unless you add a controller card. The bottom line is, there's more to installing a HD than plugging in the cables. 3. Windows NT, the dominant business PC OS, plays havoc with DHDs. When my work PC had 32MB DRAM, I used to copy files to the DHD, turn off the DHD power key, and take it home - without powering down the PC - very fast, just like a true removable. But a few months ago, I got 128MB DRAM upgrade, and the next time I took some stuff home, it wasn't there! Well, actually the data was there, but the directory tree was still in my work PC's write-behind cache (which I couldn't find a way to turn off in NT), so my home PC "saw" an empty drive. Thus I now must power down the work PC, a ridiculously long process in Windows NT on our network. Another irritation is the way NT runs the (very slow) CHKDSK program on all new HD partitions. This prolongs an already slow NT boot-up by about 2 minutes per GB. Admittedly, it only happens once in a while, but I like reformatting my DHD periodically, to optimize the data, defrag the file system, run diagnostics, experiment, etc. Another annoyance with Win NT is it can only share files with other OSes like Win98 by using FAT16. This forces users to get into partitioning >2GB DHDs, a somewhat arcane process that I doubt most ordinary users have the stomach for. Those that do should probably use PQMagic from Partition Quest since it has a good manual explaining the ins and outs of HD partitions. True removables, which currently don't exceed 2GB, have none of these issues. In short, though I personally do like you say, I wouldn't recommend it for non-power-users. Even my peers, software developers with years of PC experience at home and work, have no interest in solving the home/work data transport problem the way I do. And I've been trying to convince them for over a year now. DHDs are a great niche product, but I'd be surprised if they pose a serious threat to removables. Sincerely, Ed Peters