Mass Storage Solutions

More Mass Storage Solutions

A Technology Report on the latest high-capacity drives

See also Part 1 of this article: massstorage.html

(For information on CD Recordable Drives, see the article on CD-R.)

SparQ: not for Mac

The SyQuest SparQ is a 1 Gigabyte removable media drive for a little more than the price of a Zip. One of the SparQ's best attributes is its remarkably low cost-per-magabyte. At about US$30 for a 1GB disc, the cost-per-MB is about 3 to 4 cents -- significantly better than that of most other removable storage technologies. At least until rewritable DVD becomes widely available (and hopefully popular) later in 1998, the SparQ is one of the best values in removable storage. However, our oldest SparQ disc suffered a serious crash resulting in catastophic data loss after about six months of heavy use -- we are less inclined to recommend SparQ drives or rely on their media after this little disaster.

The Macintosh News Network (http://www.macnn.com/) reports that the SparQ drive is for use with IDE- or parallel port-equipped PCs only. SyQuest, which is currently considering bankruptcy, apparently has no plans for a Mac version. A deal-mac report confirms this.

Super-large Hard Drives

Super-large hard drives such as Seagate's new Elite 47, a 47 GB hard drive, also became available in the first quarter of 1998. The Seagate unit boasts an average access time of 18.6 ms and offers sustained transfer of 11-15 MB/sec (at 5,400 rpm); Seagate is also shipping improved, high-performance, 10,000-rpm SCSI-3 Cheetah drives that it says reduce heat dissipation and power consumption, allowing them to be used in a wider variety of desktop machines. Note, however, that 10,000 RPM drives are often amazingly noisy.

Shown at PC Expo in June 1998 was one of the first public appearances of Catlewood's long-promised and much-hyped Orb drive -- a latecomer into the removable storage market segment now dominated by Iomega and SyQuest, with their Jaz and SparQ product lines, respectively. The Orb, was shown in internal EIDE and external parallel versions.(Ominously, the parallel drive was broken at the show). The company says internal and external SCSI versions for Mac are also forthcoming, possibly as soon as Sept. Of course, these are the same people who promised a May ship date for the still unreleased PC version.

Based on the plastics and mechanical details of the preproduction models on display on the show floor, it is clear that the Orb still needs more work. Regardless, its price/performance may serve to hold some people off from buying a different product.

For further reading:

• An overview of SCSI
• Choosing the Right Removable Storage Device
• The pros and cons of storage device options
• Looking forward to backing up -- A look at the major back-up and storage technologies
• Partition utility truly magical -- PowerQuest's product makes for smoother resizing
• SyQuest strikes back -- 1.5GB drive a quantum leap in removable storage