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.
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.
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