SyQuest recently announced a drive that will compete head-on with Iomega's Zip, though with some crucial differences.
The EZ135
wasn't available for review at press time, but the initial version--an internal IDE drive--is expected to ship by the time you read this.
Like other SyQuest drives, the 135-MB EZ135 cartridges use standard hard drive platters, but they're not compatible with other 3-1/2-inch SyQuest drives. SyQuest expects cartridges to sell for the same price as Zip cartridges ($20) while providing roughly 35 percent more storage capacity.
With expected street prices of $200 for the internal IDE drive and $239 for the 2-1/2-pound external SCSI drive (expected to appear in July), the pricing is also si
milar to that of the Zip drives. However, with an average seek time of 13.5 ms and an aver-age throughput of nearly 2 MBps, SyQuest's EZ135 claims twice the performance of Iomega's Zip drive.
According to Rod Watkins, an analyst with the market research firm Dataquest (San Jose, CA), SyQuest was able to respond to the Zip drive quickly because the EZ135 is a scaled-down SQ3270 and shares many of the same components and media. SyQuest cut costs through economies of scale by reducing the internal buffer from 128 KB to 64 KB and by using industry-standard drive components.
Sold to computer dealers for integration into new PCs, the initial shipment of the internal IDE EZ135 is not aimed at consumers. But SyQuest is expected to mount an aggressive end-user campaign once the external SCSI version starts shipping. In addition, Microsoft will include an EZ135 driver in Windows 95. According to SyQuest sources, an external parallel-port version will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.
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Syquest Takes On Zip
