Floppy Killers?

With apologies to Mark Twain, reports of the death of the floppy disk have been greatly exaggerated. Every year, as companies roll out new high-capacity media, the obituaries get rewritten. But the venerable 3.5-inch floppy disk lives on, like a wily old cat with more lives than good sense.

So why is it still around? Because new PCs still come with floppy drives. But removable-media drives offer much larger storage capacities and better transportability. The first Iomega Zip drive I bought almost four years ago still serves daily duty as a repository of each day's writing work. And my wife, a tax accountant, uses Zip cartridges for archiving her clients' files. Small businesses whose computers aren't networked can use removable media to "sneakernet"--a way of sharing large files among PCs by walking a disk from one system to another. Removable-media drives also make uploading and downloading huge graphics files much speedier.

To compare the latest batch of high-capacity media, we looked at 13 drives from six manufacturers. Iomega, which dominates the market, offers six of the products we review here, ranging from the classic but slow parallel port 100MB Zip to the fast 2GB SCSI Jaz drive. Joining Iomega's bread-and-butter 100MB Zip line is a new USB version. In addition, the company has cooked up a drive that uses 250MB Zip cartridges, and the $299 Clik, a tiny, battery-powered drive that uses 40MB cartridges the size of silver dollars. Because Clik is designed to work primarily with digital cameras and palmtop PCs, we didn't test it in this roundup. (For a review, see April's New Products. Hinting at what we may expect to see in the future, Iomega spokesperson Jonathan Graham says the company is also "looking at other technologies such as FireWire, DVD-ROM, and CD-Rewritable."

Meanwhile, Sony's long-awaited 200MB HiFD debuted badly. CompUSA quietly pulled the first units off the shelves after Sony discovered some performance glitches. Indeed, at press time, Sony said it would not release the HiFD again until this fall, by which time it expected to have the problems ironed out. Also on the horizon is a 123MB HiFD drive from Samsung, currently dubbed the Pro-FD, due before the end of the year.

New drives in the review include Caleb's UHD144 and Castlewood's fast Orb drive. Before the holidays, Caleb promises to offer a $99 parallel port version of its UHD144, while Castlewood plans to offer $199 parallel, $199 SCSI, and $249 USB versions of the Orb.

The remaining drives we tested use the 120MB SuperDisk (aka LS-120) format developed by 3M spin-off Imation. Nearly as common as Zips, SuperDisks owe much of their popularity to their compatibility with standard 1.44MB floppies. Imation says it is "considering other interfaces" to add to its parallel port SuperDisk drive, but declined to be more specific. The company sells a USB version, but for the Apple iMac only. It plans to offer a higher-performance SuperDisk in the next few months, though the details weren't available at press time.

Though new competitors and technologies continue to challenge Iomega's dominance in the removable-media market, the past year has seen some casualties as well. SyQuest and Avatar Systems, creator of the 250MB Shark drive, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. At press time, SyQuest was still offering product repairs to its customers, and Iomega had acquired SyQuest's technologies but was neither selling nor supporting SyQuest drives. Also, Maxell, though not bankrupt, stopped manufacturing its line of SuperDisk drives as we went to press--a shame because its affordable, parallel port SuperDisk drive performed well in our tests. You can still buy Avatar, Maxell, and SyQuest products through some online mail-order catalogs, but make sure the necessary media is available, too.

Storage Alternatives

As hard disk sizes increase and prices fall, adding a second hard drive is becoming a better storage option than buying some of the removable devices here.

In addition, optical drives such as CD-Recordable and CD-Rewritable drives are catching on. They offer a longer estimated life span--100 years, as opposed to 10 to 20 years for magnetic disks--and more capacity (around 650MB). CD-R/RW discs also cost about $5 less than the cheapest removable-media disk in this review, Caleb's $8 UHD144 disk. And a CD-R/RW disc can be shared with nearly any PC equipped with a CD-ROM drive, allowing you to transfer discs from system to system. However, whereas CD-R/RW media are dirt-cheap, the drives are expensive--$350 to $400, compared with $79 to $350 for the devices in this roundup.

Online backup services like Atrieva, Connected Online Backup, and Evault also serve as storage alternatives. With these services, you send your compressed, encrypted data through the Internet, and the firms store your data on secure servers. However, online backup services aren't the most convenient way to transfer files, and their fees are high, averaging $20 per month. (Atrieva is free, but you're bombarded with ads.) Plus, it can take a long time to upload files onto the Web using a 56-kbps modem.

Ultimately, low cost, high capacity, and ease of use make some of the removable-media drives we reviewed your best bet. When buying, choose an interface (the connection between your PC and your drive) that suits your needs. The devices here come in five interface types--EIDE, IDE, parallel, SCSI, and USB. EIDE and SCSI drives perform the fastest but may be hard to install. USB drive setup, on the other hand, is a near no-brainer--assuming you have a computer with a USB connection (or a USB add-on card) and Windows 95 OSR2 or 98. For portability, consider either a parallel or USB drive--just remember that parallel devices can run painfully slow.

We evaluated each drive in five categories: overall cost (including the price of the drive and its media and availability of the products), ease of use (primarily setup), performance, features and design, and service and support. Most of the 13 drives we tested measured up well against our criteria. Our smooth experience with the majority of them says good things about the technologies on which they are based. Here's how the competitors stacked up.