Making its first foray into the consumer market, SyQuest Technology Inc has launched a removable cartridge drive that targets the same users as Iomega Corp’s Zip drive. SyQuest’s 3.5 EZ135 Drive, which is based on Winchester technology, offers 135Mb of storage at a cost of ú150, and is designed for small office, home office users. Its price and capacity compares more than favourably with the Zip drive launched in April, which stores 100Mb and costs around ú130. And given the problems the Roy, Utah-based Iomega has had in meeting demand for the Zip, SyQuest, Fremont, California, appears to be more than willing to fill the growing demand for storage in the consumer market and will ship the EZ135 this month. Early in June Iomega admitted that it was having tro uble meeting demand for the Zip, which ran at ten times what it had expected, and has had to go to Seiko Epson Co to get enough of the things made (CI No 2,691). However, Syquest is treading a similar path to the one blazed by Iomega, packaging the drive with software for back-up and file cataloguing, but the company claims superior performance: 13.5ms average access time compared with Zip’s 29ms; sustained data transfer rates of up to 2.4Mbps against 1.25Mbs; and a 64Kb buffer size compared with 32Kb. The EZ135 comes in an internal version with IDE connection and an external version, the size of a paperback, with either a SCSI or parallel port connection, and is more expensive at ú180. But it’s compatible with notebook computers, although the SCSI version needs a parallel port adaptor or a PC Card SCSI adaptor. Cartridges for the drive cost ú12, roughly the same as for the Zip. SyQuest plans to offer higher capacity drives that will be compatible with the EZ135.
