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Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 09:09:40 +0200 From: Maurice klein Gebbinck <mauricek@cs.kun.nl> had heard something of EZ drives, but the only thing I could find was a Zip drive from iomega. The brochure says it "works like a hard drive", can store 100MB on a single disk, has a throughput of up to 20MB/min, sustained transfer rate of up to 1.25 MB/s(?), seek time of 29 ms, average start/stop time of 5/3 s. The disks hold around 96 binary megabytes (96 * 2^20 bytes), the transfer time is about right for the SCSI drive, as confirmed by the Adaptec benchmark program. I haven't checked the other specs. Price in the US is $200 for the drive and one disk, plus about $15 per disk when purchased in quantities of about 10. (The prices may have dropped a bit, I haven't checked recently.) The drive is very useful for archiving or backing up medium-size projects. It is particularly useful for storing all of those .zip and .tar.gz files I'm constantly downloading from the internet, although I find that my download archives currently span about 5 Zip disks. I don't recommend it as a general backup device; it's too small and the media cost is too high. The Jaz drive, when available, will hold more and be much faster, but the drive is $500 and the media cost is about the same per megabyte. PC Connection claims they won't have them until June. My backup device of choice is DDS DAT -- the features, performance, capacity, reliability, and media cost (one-twentieth that of the Zip drive) are outstanding -- but at $1000 for the drive, it's expensive for most people. DDS drives have very fast lookup features that make them work well as archival devices, provided you have the software to take advantage of it; I believe that good software is easy to come by these days, for all operating systems.