Ditto Max Pro Born Again

For years, low-priced Ditto tape drives well served budget users' backup needs. When Iomega sold the brand to Tecmar, vendor of some excellent high-end Travan and digital audio tape backup drives, we expected great things. Tecmar has now rereleased the 10GB Ditto Max Professional, adding to the software bundle, maintaining compatibility with Ditto 3GB, 5GB, and 7GB cartridges, and keeping the price the same as what Iomega's 7GB Ditto Max drive used to cost. The drive is available in internal ($160 street) and external ($210) versions.

Unfortunately, however, the Ditto Max Professional suffers from difficult installation and slow performance; it's still based on old floppy-interface technology, and as such, it's easily outpaced by faster, cheaper IDE backup drives.

Complicated Installation

Installing the 5.25-inch, full-height, internal Ditto Max Professional wasn't as easy as it should have been. The drive uses its own ISA 4-mbps floppy controller card, instead of your system's faster built-in IDE interface. Installing the card proved no problem, but there were no instructions for attaching the ribbon cable between the open-faced cable connectors on the card and on the drive.

To further complicate matters, the installation guide falsely indicated the position of the Pin 1 stripe on the cable. Through trial and error, we eventually got the cable attached correctly, but not before our patience was severely tested. On the plus side, Windows 98 already had the proper drivers for both the controller and the drive, and it installed them automatically.

Software installation went off without a hitch. To handle basic backup chores, Tecmar includes Ditto Tools--a dead ringer for Hewlett-Packard's Colorado Backup II and Veritas's Backup Exec. Ditto Tools is straightforward, powerful, and easy to use.

Tecmar also includes FlashFile, a program that works in the background and allows you to use the Ditto like a hard drive, storing and retrieving files at will. When FlashFile is operating, the Ditto shows up under Windows as a removable cartridge drive. You can then use the Ditto like any other drive on your system, dragging and dropping files to and from its icon or window. Without FlashFile, or a similar utility, tape drives generally can be accessed only through their backup programs. Tecmar promises 5-second access to any file within the special 125MB formatted area of the tape that FlashFile uses. Our limited testing showed that claim to be accurate.