Floppy Killers?

Nearly Painless Setups

HOT: Iomega Zip USB 100MB

NOT: Winstation Systems IDE and SCSI External SuperDisk

For removable-media drives, easy to install means easy to use: Once set up, it works like any other drive on your PC. Setup complexity depends mostly on the interface and whether the device is external or internal. By that measure, USB earns top honors for ease of use, followed by parallel port, EIDE, IDE, and SCSI.

USB drives provide smooth setups, especially since you don't need to power down your PC to install them. You plug the drive into a USB port and connect the power supply. Windows detects the drive and asks you to insert the driver disk. With both Iomega's Zip USB 100MB and Winstation's USB SuperDisk, we were up and running in minutes.

Parallel port drives are almost as easy to connect. Ideally, you turn off your PC, plug the drive in, and turn your PC back on. If a printer is already hooked up to the parallel port, you'll need to daisy-chain the printer to the drive. Imation's parallel port SuperDisk holds the edge here because of its on-screen info, even warning that your computer may freeze up while it detects the parallel port type. If it does freeze (ours didn't), you can just reboot.

Installing an internal EIDE or IDE drive is more complex, but it needn't be daunting. Briefly, every PC has two EIDE/IDE "channels," each of which supports two drives. One--usually the hard drive--is designated as the master, the other as the slave. (For more detailed advice, see "Five Tips for Healthy Drives.") Usually, you must set drive jumpers (often outlined on the drive itself or explained in the drive's manual) to make sure you don't have two masters or two slaves.

Clearly marked jumpers on EIDE and IDE drives help speed up installation. But that wasn't the case with Winstation's IDE drive: Its jumpers lack markings, and its manual comes only on CD-ROM, so you have to print out the instructions before shutting off the PC to install the drive.

SCSI devices also get a bad rap for difficult setups, but it's not always deserved. If your PC doesn't have a SCSI card, you'll have to put one in yourself, but that's not especially hard to do. (Our test PC was equipped with an Adaptec 2930U2 SCSI card.) Other SCSI installation procedures can make the process more laborious, including setting a switch on the drive to assign a unique SCSI ID number.

In addition, the type of connection cable bundled with a SCSI drive affects the setup process. All the SCSI drives we looked at, except the Winstation, include connection cables. However, Iomega continues to bundle its Zip drives with old-fashioned, 25-pin SCSI connectors that don't work with most of today's SCSI add-in cards. To hook up a SCSI-based Zip drive to an off-the-shelf SCSI card, you'll need a 50-pin SCSI cable, which costs about $25, and a $20 Iomega adapter.

If you've never installed a drive before, a well-organized manual would come in handy. Both Castlewood's and Iomega's drives come with fully illustrated manuals that take you step by step through the process and the options. Winstation, though, provides only a slip of paper telling you that the manual is on the CD-ROM. Worse, that manual is confusing, thin, and virtually useless for nonexperts.