Upgrade Guide

Thanks to their large capacities, portability, and the simple but effective security they provide, removable-media drives have become one of the most popular types of storage devices. Using one, you can keep your company or personal financial data on removable cartridges or disks, and lock them away or take them with you at the end of the day. These disks are also handy media on which to store copies of important data or even some smaller, regularly accessed files (reserving the space on your main hard drive for megabyte-hogging audio, video, or graphics files). And the ubiquity of removable-media drives (and their media) makes them a great way to exchange files that are too large to e-mail to friends or colleagues.

Choices in removable-media drives have expanded in the last year. Iomega's 100MB and 250MB Zip drives are still the most widely used, followed closely by the company's high-performance, 2GB Jaz drive. But other contenders include SuperDisk (or LS-120) drives--available from a number of manufacturers--that offer 120MB of storage on floppy-size media. And Castlewood's new high-performance Orb drive stores 2.2GB on low-cost cartridges (see June's "Floppy Killers?").

Regardless of the specific removable-media drive you choose, external ones that hook up to your PC's Universal Serial Bus port or parallel port are the easiest to install and offer the most portability. But if you can get through the installation process, internal drives--IDE or SCSI--are faster and are more convenient to use. Here's how to install both kinds of internal removable-media drives.