- How many files, used for presentations in today's world, will fit on a 3.5 inch floppy at 1.44MB capacity? A ZIP drive cartridge holds approximately 70-71 floppies, a JAZ may hold 700 or more floppies, and a SyJET 1.5GB cartridge may hold up to 1000 or more floppies! All on something you can carry in your shirt or blouse pocket!
- 3.5 inch floppies are slow as Christmas.
- What if I want to carry many large files from business to business as I make a trip?
- What if I want to make a copy of all files on my computer on a device?
IOMEGA Corporation gives a number of reasons for having "removable" hard drive capacity, and other companies seem to agree with them. Some of the reasons you might want a high capacity, fast access, removable device are:
- You cannot transfer files and data over a network.
- You have multiple PC's in your inventory.
- You need more hard drive space - but you don't want to buy a RAID or high capacity device for some reason.
- You need to physically transport files.
- You are upgrading your PC's.
- You have data you want to protect.
Lets assume that I, for instance, do a lot of work at home. A miracle. I need to transport files that I worked on at the office to finish at home. What is a cheap method, one that is transportable, and will pay for itself?
Well, floppies are not the solution, and copying over a network is often not available, and often, the hard disk on a computer cannot accept up to a gigabyte, or more, of additional files!
High capacity external devices can solve these problems, and they have access speeds that can rival the speeds of hard disk drives! I can have cartridges that range from 100MB to 1.5GB, depending on the type of device I purchase. The device can accept cartridges that are nearly the same physical size as a 3.5 inch floppy, but with hundreds of times the capacity. The device (drive) itself is portable, and has either parallel interface, or SCSI interface. Excellent reasons for buying one.
| SITUATION | BENEFITS |
|---|---|
| Any Situation | Backup/Archieve |
| Not Networked | Share Data |
| Need HardDrive Space | Share data, low cost. |
| Need HardDrive Space | Less Network Traffic |
| Need HardDrive Space | More space per dollar |
| Mobile Files | Yes, if not networked. |
| Upgrading PCs | Yes - extends life of PC. |
| Data Security | Yes - Available when needed. |
There are multiple vendors of external, high capacity storage devices that can be used as high speed storage devices, backup devices, etc. I will concentrate primarily on devices manufactured by IOMEGA Corp.; however, SyQuest Corporation and 3M Corporation also produce these high quality devices.
The manufacturer of "JAZ", "ZIP", and "DITTO" (trademarks registered Iomega Corp.) drives is "IOEMEGA, INC". SyQuest Technology Inc produces a competitive product (called 'SyJet') with 1.5GB cartridges. The SyJet was shipped to retailers in the internal SCSI version in January 1997.
IOMEGA's products are the most well known. The JAZ drives normally cost $500.00 or less, and the cost of each JAZ cassette is now under $100.00 per 1 GB of storage. The suggested retail price of the SyJet 1.5GB internal SCSI drive devices was $399 and $499 for the external, portable version.
Regardless of the vendor you choose, the purpose is to add "additional, endless, portable, high-speed storage" to a computing system. These devices have a 10-12 millisecond seek time and burst transfer rate of 10MB/second.
- JAZ DRIVE:
Courtesy IOMEGA Corp.The JAZ drive (as shown) is attached to an expansion card in one of your PC's expansion slots. It accepts a 1 GB cartridge, diskette, (or whatever you choose to call it) that costs less than $100.00. This diskette holds data that can be inserted into the JAZ drive and read or written to. It is somewhat like inserting a large diskette, that it can be written to at any time.
A JAZ drive holds a larger amount of storage than a CD-ROM, and you do not have to have a special CD-ROM device to be able to record from your PC. JAZ drives can be written to at any time. Actually, write-enable CD-ROM drives have been available at virtually the same cost as JAZ drives, and the individual diskettes are actually cheaper. However, writing to a CD-ROM is a one-time operation, which has not mastered the art of multiple writes, in a random fashion. Once written, often read, but not overwriteable. Tough. Along comes the ZIP and JAZ drives, which behave much as a 3.5 inch diskette. Selling point.
One primary selling point of JAZ drives is that they now have "near" Hard disk access time (10-12 millesec seek time), and data transfer rates!
JAZ drives have 1 GB capacity cartridges, which cost $100 dollars or less per 100 MB cartridge, and they are as portable as a CD-ROM and are rewriteable! Excellent characteristics.
- SyJET Drive:
The SyJET is very much like the JAZ in capabilities; however, it has a 3.5 inch Winchester Removable cartridge that holds 1.5GB or 50% more than a JAZ drive. It costs about the same, and comes in three initial configurations: internal SCSI; external portable SCSI, and external parallel port configurations. It can be purchased as SCSI II compatible. An "internal enhanced IDE version will be available in 1997. SyJet, with its greater capacity and near same cost, wins the Megabits per dollar war with IOMEGA.
- ZIP DRIVE:
ZIP Drives are similar in appearance to JAZ drives; however, their
capacity is usually limited to 100MB, or about 1/10th of a JAZ drive.
Of course, they are much less expensive.- Some information about ZIP drives:
- ZIP drives themselves cost about $200.00 or slightly less.
- Disk cartridges cost between $9.99 and $15.00.
- They come in Parallel Port or SCSI models.
- Capacity per cartridge is 100MB.
- Works with almost all PC operating systems except UNIX.
- You have your choice of 2 external types and an internal type.
ZIP Drive Advantages are:
- High capacity, portable cartridges.
- Portable drive.
- SCSI or Parallel interfaces.
- Near 'hard drive' performance speed.
- Cartridges have a 10 year shelf life.
- Cartridges can survive an eight foot drop without loss of data.
- DITTO DRIVE:
A "ditto" drive as pictured is a streaming cassette tape drive. It is
an excellent device for backup of your hard drives. It has a relatively
high capacity of 2.3GB per tape.The cost is relatively low, and it has a SCSI or a Parallel interface. It writes at a speed of XXXX MBPS.
Storage Device Menu