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Iomega 750 MB Zip Drive

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

It all started with an idea to create a fast, cheap and higher capacity drive

in April 1994. And soon enough, the first zip drive was introduced at Comdex in

November 1994. It had a motorized disk ejection function, and took flexible

magnetic media that was 100 MB in capacity and protected with a rugged covering.

The idea was so successful, that till date, 48 million drives and 300 million

disks have been sold worldwide. So far, the Iomega zip disks had been available

in 250 MB disk capacities.

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Weighing just 180 g, it is extremely portable and sleek. It also supports the new USB 2.0 interface

Snapshot
IOMEGA 750 MB USB ZIP DRIVE
Price:
Rs 10700 for drive; Rs. 600 for 750 MB Zip Disk; one year warranty
Feature:
USB 2.0, backward compatible with USB 1.1 and older 250 MB
Pros:
High storage capacity, high Transfer rate, compatible with Win 98/2000/XP and Mac OS
Contact:
Ingram Micro India, Mumbai
Tel: 
022-5553200/04/07
E-mail:
Vishal@ingrammicro.co.in

This is changing once again with the debut of an external zip drive that can

hold 750 MB of data in the same small disk–more than what CD-R media can

handle.

The drive supports the new USB 2.0 interface, and can be used by both PC and

Mac users. Itis sleek, lightweight and extremely portable, weighing just 180 g.

The drive is also backward compatible with USB 1.1, and the older 250 MB zip

disks. But, it will only be able to read the data from 100 MB disks. Being USB

2.0, it supports a higher transfer rate than the earlier drives.

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Being USB, setting it up is quite easy. It comes with an installation CD that

contains the drivers, Automatic Backup, and IomegaSync software along with

MusicMatch Jukebox. The automatic backup software formerly known as Quick Sync

allows easy and scheduled backup of important files. This software creates an

Active partition on your computer and synchronizes whatever data you place in it

against the zip drive. So every time you plug the drive into your PC, it checks

the changes made in the active partition and prompts you on whether you want to

reflect those changes on the zip disk.

We tested the drive on a machine running Windows XP having a P4 2 GHz

processor, Asus P4B533-E motherboard, 128 MB RAM, and a Seagate 7200 rpm hard

drive. It was automatically detected after plugging it in, and created a

separate drive icon for itself. You can access certain functions like format and

eject by right-clicking the drive letter. It supports two format options, long

and short. Long format took approx 10 mins while the short format took only

about 10 secs. To check the data transfer rates and disk access time of the

drive, we used WinBench99 on the PC. It gave a maximum data transfer rate of

6.32 Mbps, which is great. We then tried transferring about 100 MB of MP3 files

from the hard drive to the zip. Here, it took about 48 secs to do the transfer.

The Bottom Line: Overall, the new drive is easy to use and highly

portable for high capacity and fast storage.

Anil Chopra with Rashmi Sahu at PCQ Labs

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