A place for your stuff
Getting stuff on and off your Windows NT system is no small concern. Small
businesses, especially graphics design firms, can't afford fancy output devices,
so such firms have to run down to the service bureau with the files. For help,
check out the popular new Iomega Zip cartridge drive. It works well under NT,
once you install the right drivers.
A Place for My Stuff
In the Early Cretaceous era of personal
computing, I attended the University of California at San Diego. During the
Blaise of glory that was the UCSD Pascal project, we carried data around on 8"
floppies in shocking-pink Dysan disk boxes. These floppies first held 241KB,
then 1.2MB, each. We worked on a variety of computers, all long since obsolete,
and felt superior to the Apple II community with its dinky 5.25" floppies.
Ironically, since then, the standard for portable data-storage has grown
only 20%, to 1.44MB, while everything else in the computer industry expanded in
orders of magnitude. True, the physical size of the disk has shrunk to 3.5",
and taste has relegated the shocking-pink disk box to toxic-waste dumps. But no
single unit of read/write storage has even vaguely threatened the floppy for
universality.
Finally, that monopoly appears to be breaking up. Now NT 3.51 Service Pack 4
is 10MB; Netscape plugins are 2MB each; and by adding one graphic, you can
create a WordPro document that overflows one floppy. We need a new way to
transport files, and if any random-access, read/write medium has a chance to
rival the floppy, the 100MB Iomega Zip disk is it.
This versatile storage medium has the low end of the removable market to
itself, now that SyQuest has withdrawn the 135MB SyJet. On the horizon are a few
new removables, notably the DL120 drive, which will read and write regular
1.44MB 3.5" floppies and its 120MB cartridges. But so far, the DL120 is
shipping only with Compaqs.
The Zip is becoming ubiquitous: It's shipping as an internal drive in HP
desktops, Kinko's puts it on all in-store rental computers, and every graphics
output business has at least one. A friend jokes that he has all the 3.5"
disks he'll ever need, and he wants America Online to send out Zips. They're
universal the way SyQuest 44MB drives never quite were.
Iomega now makes two Zips, SCSI and parallel. The much-awaited IDE version
hasn't shipped. Non-Intel NT users will have to use the SCSI version (no plans
for parallel drivers so far). The SCSI drive transfers data two to three times
faster than the parallel version, but of course, your system has to have a SCSI
controller.
If you choose a SCSI Zip, I strongly recommend letting NT's Disk
Administrator see your Zip disks before you use them. Computer artist David Em
had problems with his SCSI Zip dropping files. The problems disappeared after he
learned just to let NT see the files. Don't reformat them, and especially don't
reformat them as NT File System (NTFS), unless you use them only on NT.
The disadvantage of the parallel drive is that you can't move files to a
Mac or Unix system. Of course, at $200 for either SCSI or parallel, the Zip
drive is so cheap you can buy one of each. To move a huge file to a Mac--say for
output to a high-end image setter--the Zip beats dialup transfer, and with
modern system software, Macs can see DOS Zip disks directly. The Zip comes with
guest software for DOS and Windows, which makes attaching to a customer's PC a
two-minute operation, and no reboot is necessary.
A side note: The Zip represents a very large portion of Iomega's new
business, yet I'm happy to report the company didn't abandon previous products
such as Bernoulli drives. The Zip readmes say the same NT drivers work on many
Iomega products without modification, so large corporations that have invested
in this technology can continue to use it.