Jazz or Zip Drives
There are a number of reasons a zip or jazz drive is desirable:
  • A large majority of the business presentations developed for today's world are so large (3-9Mb) they will not fit on one 3-1/2" floppy disk.

  • Using a Zip utility such as Winzip is not acceptable because you would have to carry several floppies for one presentation.

  • Jazz or Zip disks can be carried in your shirt or blouse pocket and can hold much more data than floppies. As an example:

    • A ZIP drive cartridge holds the equivalent of 70-71 floppies.

    • A JAZ drive cartridge holds the equivalent of more that 700 floppies.

    • SyJET 1.5GB cartridges can hold up to 1000 or more floppies

  • For the most part, using 3.5 inch floppies on any system is as slow as Christmas.

  • If you need to carry many large files on a busines trip, using floppies would me a nightmare to manage.
IOMEGA Corporation gives a number of reasons for having "removable" hard drive capacity, and other companies seem to agree with them.

Some of the reasons you might want a high capacity, fast access, removable device are:

  • You cannot transfer files and data over a network.

  • You have multiple PC's in your inventory.

  • You need more hard drive space - but you don't want to buy a RAID or high capacity device for some reason.

  • You need to physically transport files.

  • You are upgrading your PC's.

  • You have data you want to protect.

To give you another example lets assume that you do a lot of work at home. There will come a time when you will need to the files you worked on back to your office.

Using floppies is not the answer. Nor is coping over a dial-up network connection.  Most dial-up network connections are very slow at best. Sometimes the computer that you want to install these files on may not have the hard drive space.

High capacity external devices can solve these problems. They have access speeds that can rival the speeds of hard disk drives. The Jazz or Zip drive itself is protable.

Excellent reasons for buying one could be.

SITUATION BENEFITS
Any Situation Can be used for backup/Archieve
Your System is Not Networked Can be used to share
You Need Hard
Drive Space		 You can share data at a wer cost.
Need to Travel
With Files		 You can fit one of these disks in your shirt pocket or blouse
When Upgrading PCs Provides high capasity backup
Increasing Data Security Files can be better secured.


There are number of vendors that provide high capacity external removable disks that can be used as high speed storage devices.

Please Note:

  • The names "JAZ Drive, "ZIP Drive", and "Ditto Drive" are registered trademarks of IOMEGA, INC.

  • The name "'SyJet'" is a registered trademarks of SyQuest Technology Inc.

Regardless of the vendor you choose, the purpose is to add "additional, endless, portable, high-speed storage" to a computing system. These devices have a 10-12 millisecond seek time and burst transfer rate of 10MB/second.

JAZ DRIVE: - Courtesy IOMEGA Corp. - The JAZ drive (as shown) is attached to an expansion card in one of your PC's expansion slots.

  • It accepts a 1 GB cartridge, diskette, (or whatever you choose to call it) that costs less than $100.00.

  • This diskette holds data that can be inserted into the JAZ drive and read or written to.

  • It is somewhat like inserting a large diskette, that it can be written to at any time.

A JAZ drive holds a larger amount of storage than a CD-ROM, and you do not have to have a special CD-ROM device to be able to record from your PC.

JAZ drives can be written to at any time. Actually, write-enable CD-ROM drives have been available at virtually the same cost as JAZ drives, and the individual diskettes are actually cheaper.

However, writing to a CD-R CD-ROM is a one-time operation, which does not have the capability of multiple writes, in a random fashion.

Once written, often read, but not overwriteable.

One primary selling point of JAZ drives is that they now have "near" Hard disk access time (10-12 millesec seek time), and data transfer rates!

JAZ drives have 1 GB capacity cartridges, which cost $100 dollars or less per 100 MB cartridge, and they are as portable as a CD-ROM and are rewriteable! Excellent characteristics.

SyJET Drive: - The SyJET is very much like the JAZ in capabilities; however, it has a 3.5 inch Winchester Removable cartridge that holds 1.5GB or 50% more than a JAZ drive.

It costs about the same, and comes in four configurations:

  • Iinternal SCSI.
  • External portable SCSI.
  • External parallel port.
  • Internal enhanced IDE.

ZIP DRIVE: - ZIP Drives are similar in appearance to JAZ drives; however, their capacity is limited to 100 or 250 MB. Of course, they are much less expensive.

Some information about ZIP drives:

  • ZIP drives themselves cost about $119.00 or slightly less.

  • Disk cartridges cost between $9.99 and $17.00.

  • They come in Parallel Port, USB, or SCSI models.

  • Capacity per cartridge is 100MB/250MB.

  • Works with almost all PC operating systems except UNIX.

  • You have your choice of 3 external types and an internal type.

ZIP Drive Advantages are:

  1. High capacity, portable cartridges.
  2. Portable drive.
  3. SCSI, USB, or Parallel interfaces.
  4. Near 'hard drive' performance speed.
  5. Cartridges have a 10 year shelf life.
  6. Cartridges can survive an eight foot drop without loss of data.

DITTO DRIVE:

A "ditto" drive as pictured is a streaming cassette tape drive. It is an excellent device for backup of your hard drives. It has a relatively high capacity of 2.3GB per tape.

The cost is relatively low, and it has a SCSI or a Parallel interface. It writes at a speed of XXXX MBPS.

Storage Device Menu