Small, removable-media drives build a better bridge over the gap between floppies and hard drives
Stan Miastkowski
Removable-media drives have sat on the mass-storage sidelines for years. For some applications, their combination of unlimited storage and hard drive-like performance has been indispensable. But in general, high drive and cartridge prices have hampered hopes of commodity stardom. Two brand-new 3-1/2-inch drives reviewed here, from
SyQuest and Iomega
, could bring this storage category greater appreciation with new standards for price and convenience.
The three major technologies competing in the removable-media drive market have been MO (magneto-optical), SyQuest, and Iomega Bernoulli. MO drives and their ilk remain expensive, with drive prices starting at around $800 for 3-1/2-i
nch internal 230-MB units, but they have enjoyed popularity in corporate environments, mainly for the long-term storage of essential data.
While MO technology promises greater storage life than purely magnetic technologies, its complexity keeps drive prices high and write times relatively slow. But on the plus side, the media is inexpensive, at under $30 per 230-MB cartridge, which often makes an MO drive less expensive in the long run (see the figure
"Making Sense of Cost"
).
Magnetic removable-media drives from Iomega and SyQuest use very different technologies. To the delight of users, the rivalry between these two companies has spurred higher capacities and lower prices. SyQuest places what's essentially a standard hard disk platter in its cartridges. Iomega's aptly named Bernoulli drives use the Bernoulli aerodynamic principle to control a flexible disk as it rapidly spins.
Besides letting you lock away sensitive data and quickly back up standard hard disks, rem
ovable-media drives have gained popularity for storing and transporting sizeable files, such as high-resolution graphics images. While Bernoulli drives are popular with PC users, SyQuest drives have long been an industry standard in the Macintosh-dominated publishing, advertising agency, and desktop publishing markets.
Both technologies have traditionally been burdened with high prices for both drives and cartridges and the inconvenient form factor of 5-1/4-inch media. But all that's changing fast. Both SyQuest and Iomega are now shipping 3-1/2-inch removable media drives, and the Iomega Zip drive's pricing has fallen to commodity levels. New markets are open for removable media, and a combination of consumer demand and marketing factors is driving down the technology's price.
User-Focused Zip
Iomega's Zip drive underscores the dramatic swing toward a new consumer trend in removable media. Its consumer-driven design, pricing, marketing, and ease of use represent a radica
l new approach for the PC drive industry--and one that's being quickly emulated by others (see the sidebar "SyQuest Takes On Zip").
Rather than use the old engineer-driven "build neat stuff and they will come" design philosophy, Iomega queried end-user focus groups, asking potential customers what they wanted most in a removable-media drive. According to Iomega, the three strongest desires were storage capacity of at least 100 MB, performance approaching that of a conventional hard drive, and a price tag no higher than $200. Surprisingly, Zip fulfills all those ideals.
Zip's designers started from scratch, dumping the proven Bernoulli technology in the process. While the Zip drive still uses air currents to stabilize flexible media at high spin rates, it doesn't rely on the Bernoulli effect to pull the media up to a stationary read/write head. Rather, a standard Winchester hard drive head in the Zip flies over the media surface. As with a Bernoulli design, the flexible disk makes the media light
and shock-resistant. Both the drive and its media are portable.
The $199.95 Zip drive uses 25- and 100-MB cartridges (with suggested retail prices of $9.95 and $19.95, respectively) and offers good performance. But what's most striking about the Zip drive is its stylish and functional design. Created by a lead-ing industrial designer, the sleek blue case makes a big departure from the typical external drive box. Thankfully, ergonomics hasn't taken a back seat to design. For example, the indentation beneath the slot where you put the cartridge is deep enough to accommodate long fingernails, and a see-through window lets you read the label of an inserted cartridge.
Using off-the-shelf heads, servos, and drive electronics--instead of custom-made drive components, such as the still-available Bernoulli drives--helped Zip's designers keep development and manufacturing costs down without compromising performance or versatility. Another cost-saving feature is its unibody construction. The plastic case
is an integral part of the drive, which carries with it the added benefit of increased shock resistance. The Zip is roughly the size of a paperback book, and it weighs just under a pound. Equipped with several sets of rubber feet, it can stably rest either flat or on its side.
The Zip comes in two interface versions, as either a SCSI or parallel unit. The SCSI version includes both PC and Mac software. (If your PC does not have a SCSI adapter, Iomega sells one for $149.95.) Easy-to-use switches on the back of the SCSI drive set SCSI ID and termination settings. For PC users, the parallel unit is a good portable choice for moving among different machines, with the help of unique software. A pass-through parallel port lets you attach a printer.
Media Trails
A bit larger and thicker than a standard 3-1/2-inch floppy disk, the Fuji-made Zip drive cartridge fits easily in a shirt pocket. According to Iomega, a "ski trail" test that continually reads and writes a single data t
rack on the cartridge revealed an average of 2000 hours before errors start to occur. By comparison, although it spins at a much lower rate of rotation, a standard floppy disk starts to show errors after 100 hours.
The Zip's user-friendly focus extends to its installation and use. The SCSI version of the Zip drive comes with a large envelope containing two floppy disks (one for the PC, one for the Mac), an eight-page fold-out installation guide that covers both platforms, and an eight-page user's guide. Installation consists of plugging in an AC power brick, plugging the drive into the appropriate computer port (SCSI or parallel), turning on your system, and running the setup software from a floppy disk.
For both PC and Mac platforms, the installation process installs a group of handy utilities, including a Zip disk-copy utility, a complete hard disk-backup utility, and tools for formatting, ejecting, locking, and diagnosing Zip cartridges. Most intriguing among these is FindIt, an indexing util
ity that maintains a database of the files on all your Zip cartridges, which makes it easy to locate them with little fuss.
For the PC platform, the Zip drive does not use a conventional device-driver program invoked from your CONFIG.SYS file. Instead, a utility called Guest launches from AUTOEXEC.BAT. It looks for a Zip drive on either a SCSI or a parallel port and assigns it the next available drive letter. You can alternate between the SCSI and parallel versions of the Zip drive and have Guest recognize the drive and set it up for immediate use. This feature is obviously designed for sharing a Zip among a variety of systems. You can simply take a floppy along and run Guest as needed.
While the Zip's performance doesn't measure up to that of current hard drives, it's more than acceptable for the kind of applications you're likely to use it for. Its 32-KB buffer is rather small, but it manages to deliver an average seek time of 29 ms with 100-MB cartridges and 16 ms with 25-MB cartridges. The d
rive spins down automatically after a configurable time-out, requiring 3 seconds to spin down and 5 seconds to spin up again.
Using BYTE's Disktest, we measured the average data throughput for both versions of the Zip drive. The SCSI version (attached to an Adaptec AHA-2940 PCI SCSI card on a 90-MHz Alaris Pentium system) transferred data at about 0.65 MBps (comparable to the rate for a low-end IDE drive) for both sequential reads and writes. The parallel-port version attained data transfers of only 0.17 MBps.
SyQuest Breaks Loose
SyQuest's 270-MB SQ3270 drive represents a less radical design shift than the Zip drive. Nonetheless, its portable and convenient 3-1/2-inch form factor still represents a fresh deviation from SyQuest's traditional product line of bulky but backward-compatible 5-1/4-inch drives and cartridges. As such, the 3-1/2-inch drive represents more than just a shift in design : Although it's small and convenient, the new drive can't read SyQuest's 5-1/4-
inch cartridges currently in use. For current SyQuest users, the 44-, 88-, and 200-MB 5-1/4-inch drives remain in production.
New for the PC platform, the SyQuest's 3-1/2-inch design is actually over a year old in the Mac world. As with the larger 5-1/4-inch models, the 3-1/2-inch SyQuest drive uses what are essentially standard hard disk platters in its 270-MB cartridges (which are also available in 105-MB format). SyQuest drives use a dual-sided technology with two Winchester-type read/write heads, which results in performance that's close to that of a standard hard disk drive.
With a street price starting at approximately $500, the 3-1/2-inch 270-MB SyQuest SQ3270 drive is still aimed at the same professional market of graphics users and desktop publishers served by the larger SyQuest drives. Small office and consumer-level users are more likely to be attracted to the budget-minded Zip.
The SQ3270's standard box enclosure emphasizes its decidedly utilitarian nature. It comes in both in
ternal and external versions equipped with an IDE, SCSI, or parallel interface. Street prices range from about $500 for the internal IDE versions to about $700 for an external SCSI (without an adapter) or parallel-port version. Single 270-MB cartridges cost around $70.
Installing an external SCSI SQ3270 was a straightforward process, though not as easy as installing Iomega's Zip drive. After we plugged in the external SCSI drive, the install program placed a device driver and ASPI manager into CONFIG.SYS. A separate installation utility installed a hard disk backup program along with a variety of straightforward programs for formatting and locking SyQuest cartridges.
Helped along by its 128-KB buffer, the SyQuest SQ3270 delivered performance comparable to that of a standard hard disk. Average seek time is 13.5 ms, and average access time is 22 ms. The drive offers four programmable power modes (sleep, standby, idle, and active) and takes 10 seconds to spin down and 8 seconds to spin up. Disktest
revealed a respectable data transfer rate of 1.6 MBps with sequential reads for the SCSI version, but only 0.57 MBps with writes.
Sea Changes
While the SyQuest SQ3270 and Iomega Zip drives appeal to different needs and budgets, they both represent significant changes in removable disk storage. The SQ3270 exceeds both the capacity and the performance of SyQuest's larger drives while moving down to a convenient 3-1/2-inch format. It's a strong entry into the PC market, where the departure from the SyQuest cartridge-compatibility chain won't be noticed.
The Zip drive is a harbinger of a new generation of peripherals that finally makes "user-friendly" drives a reality. It could also conceivably signal the end of the floppy drive as we know it. With a $200 price point, it's an unbeatable value that's already shaking up the industry.
WHERE TO FIND
MDH-10 MD Data drive $749.99
Sony Electronics, Inc.
San Jose, CA
(408) 432-0190
SQ3270 $500-$700
EZ135 $200-$239
(estimated street prices,
depending on interface)
SyQuest Technology, Inc.
Fremont, CA
(510) 226-4000
fax: (510) 226-4102
Zip drive $199.95
(SCSI or parallel interface)
PC SCSI adapter $149.95
Iomega Corp.
Roy, UT
(800) 697-8833
(801) 778-1000
fax: (801) 778-3190
illustration_link (11 Kbytes)
The cost of removable-media storage climbs as you buy more media. However, you must conside
r on-line capacity as well. Iomega's Zip looks good unless you want more than 100 MB on a cartridge. We compared the current pricing of external drive units with a SCSI adapter (not needed for Macs) and one cartridge. The cost of additional media is based on bulk packs (typically containing three or five cartridges).
photo_link (44 Kbytes)
The 100-MB Iomega Zip (left) and the 270-MB SyQuest SQ3270 are both 3-1/2-inch removable-media drives. The SCSI versions shown work on nearly all platforms.
Stan Miastkowski is a BYTE consulting editor who's been writing about computer technology for 17 years. He is t
he coauthor of the Windows for Workgroups Bible (Addison-Wesley, 1993). You can contact him on the Internet or BIX at
stanm@bix.com
.
Portable-Data Stars
