That's the same price Iomega charges for its most Advanced Zip drive, and Jaz is even pricier - $299 for the internal Jaz drive, $399 for an external version. Sparq sells for $199, in either internal or external versions. Back when you bought your computer, SyQuest hadn't rolled out its onegigabyte Sparq drive. Ro, if you're reading this, don't get mad. Jaz drives are showing up as a built-in feature on high-end computers, like the one my sister Rosemary bought about eight months ago. It also hit pay dirt with Jaz, a removable drive using disks that hold one gigabyte each. Of course, Iomega isn't a one-product company.
Considering SuperDisk's speed and versatility, and growing support from computer makers, Iomega will need plenty of TV ads to stay number one. But Imation sees SuperDisk as the next-generation floppy drive - a replacement for 80 million to 100 million old-style floppy drives sold every year. A spokesman for Imation tells me there are only about 1.4 million SuperDisk drives in service. Iomega has already sold 12 million Zip drives, and its TV ads are plainly part of an 'Intel Inside'-type campaign to position Zip as the industry standard super-floppy. Indeed, several manufacturers, including Compaq, Gateway 2000, and Acer America, offer SuperDisk drives as the standard floppy drive on some of their machines.Ĭompared with Zip, SuperDisk is barely on the radar scope. One more thing: the SuperDisk drive can also read all your old 3 1/2-inch floppies, something no Zip drive can do. The SuperDisk drive did the same job in about 10 seconds, partly thanks to an excellent caching utility that does much of the copying in the background, so you can move on to other tasks. What more could I expect? Plenty, it turns out. Thus I wasn't surprised that it took about a minute to copy a 5-megabyte file onto the Zip drive. Internal hard drives talk to the computer through a high-speed connection - the two most common types are called IDE and SCSI.
It's plugged into my computer's parallel port, where you usually connect the printer. I'd come to accept stodgy performance from my Zip drive. SuperDisk flings these megabytes around surprisingly fast. Buy five and you basically get a Zip disk worth of storage free. Yet the SuperDisk holds 20 percent more data - 120 megabytes.
SuperDisk uses a disk that's lighter and thinner than a Zip disk, though at around $16 it costs about the same. The external version retails for $155, about the same as the Zip, and internal versions can be had for $120 or less. One of them is the SuperDisk drive by Imation Corp.
But if I were to go shopping today for a high-capacity drive, I'd take a hard look at a couple of tempting alternatives. I've owned a Zip since last summer, and I've gotten my $149 worth. Anybody with a home computer could use one of those super-floppy disk drives, which can store 100 megabytes of data on a disk that fits in your shirt pocket.
Hose cute Super Bowl TV ads for Iomega Corp.'s Zip drive probably sent a few thousand people scurrying to computer stores. There are alot of smart people working for Ernst & Young. DAGRIFFI has also posted that Ernst & Young will be using Superdisks instead of Zips all of their PC's. (See posts in Imation folder) The following report from the Boston Globe suggests that the LS-120 (reincarnated as the SuperDisk) is still alive and kicking. Back in July 1997 TMF's Cheeze, Nico, and 2Aruba were dancing on the grave of the LS-120.