Fremont, California-based SyQuest Technology Inc has been beaten and battered from here to breakfast time by Iomega Corp and its new Zip and Jazz drives, but the Winchester cartridge pioneer is pinning its hopes for a comeback on a family of new low-cost, high-performance removable cartridge drives priced at $300 and claimed to be faster than anything costing under $500. The removeable 230Mb cartridges for the EZFlyer drive will be $30, or 13 cents a Megabyte. The drive is backwards-compatible with its EZ135, and so can read and write cartridges from the lower- capacity EZ135. An industrial designer was also called in to do a complete redesign to make it more sleek and consumer- friendly than the EZ135 introduced last year. SyQuest’s pitch is that the EZFlyer is a Winchester where the Zip is a floppy, offering twice the access speed and faster data transfer.
