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Clik Offers Slick Notebook Storage

PC Card Drive eliminates need for cords and cables.

By Christian McIntosh, PCWorld   

The lightweight, 5mm-thick Clik PC Card Drive fits into the PC Card slot of most notebook and subnotebook computers. Iomega expects to ship the Clik PC Card Drive during the third quarter of this year.

The Clik PC Card Drive uses 40MB Clik disks. The matchbook-size magnetic disks approximate miniature hard drives in storage and were designed primarily for digital cameras and driveless handheld PCs. You can purchase the Clik disks for $10 each in packs of ten.

The device is an alternative to the company's Clik Mobile Drive; that drive's testers expressed concerns about inconvenient parallel-port connections and AC adapters. Since the Clik PC Card Drive fits directly into your notebook's PC Card slot, you don't need connector cables, power cords, or batteries.

You also can share data with friends and colleagues using a notebook computer with a PC Card slot, the company claims. "It has the potential in the future to work with any mobile computing device with a PC Card slot," says Jodie Glore, president and chief executive of Iomega.

Copy Capabilities

The drive ships with Iomega's QuikSync and Copy Machine software.

QuikSync makes a copy of your Clik disk every time you save your data and provides automatic version tracking. QuikSync software does not interrupt ongoing activities.

Copy Machine software lets you make a copy of a Clik disk using a single Clik drive.

"With the Clik PC Card Drive, you are able to utilize all of the software tools that were designed for Zip and Jaz users," says Bob Abraham, senior analyst for International Data Corporation's tape and removable storage division. "It makes for a seamless transition over to Clik."

Despite its diminutive size, the Clik PC Card Drive does not skimp on horsepower, transferring data at up to 600K per second. That's slightly slower than the external Mobile Drive version that uses a PC Card. But it's slightly faster than the external Mobile Drive version that hooks to a parallel port (and you avoid potential conflict with other parallel-port peripherals such as printers).

"The value of having the Clik drive buried in the machine is substantial," says Robert Abraham, vice president of Freeman Associates, a market research firm tracking the data storage industry.

The drive conserves power by slipping into sleep mode after three seconds of idle time.