© 1995 Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 17, no. 3, May-June 1995, pp. 48-51.
You can never have too much money or disk space. If you find yourself short of both, Iomega has a deal for you: the 100 megabyte Zip cartridge drive. And if you are a Washington Apple Pi member, you can get more of one with less of the other.
Fluid Dynamics vs. Market Forces
Zip drives mark a radical departure for Iomega. For years, the Utah-based company has produced removable-media storage systems prized for their technical excellence. Their virtually crash-proof Bernoulli drives are frequently seen at trade shows, strapped to a frantically vibrating paint-mixer, transferring data without a hitch. Even the name itself reflects the company’s commitment to technology: who else would name a computer storage device after Daniel Bernoulli, the 18th century Swiss scientist whose discoveries eventually helped create the airplane and, at Iomega, the Bernoulli drive?
Zip is, obviously, different. While “Bernoulli” requires some education even to understand the name, “Zip” doesn’t. While “Bernoulli,” to the knowledgeable, suggests “safety,” “Zip” suggests speed. While “Bernoulli” drives have a reputation for being expensive, Iomega is doing its best to convince you that “Zip” means inexpensive.
Washington Apple Pi Labs
Yet low-cost does not mean low quality. In extensive tests at Washington Apple Pi Labs (a demanding facility equipped with construction dust, mismatched cables and users who never read the manuals), every effort was made to kill a Zip 100 drive, and all such efforts ended in failure. Attempts were also made to discover a less costly storage device, without success. About the only disagreement, a mild one, concerns the color: the vast majority seem to think the case is blue (including Iomega officials), but a stubborn minority believe there is enough red in the mixture to classify it as a borderline purple.
The drive itself is small, about the size of a paperback book, and the cartridges are a bit wider and thicker than a 3.5″ diskette. It comes in four pieces: the drive, a SCSI cable (a 25 to 25-pin cable is included with the drive), one Zip 100 (100 megabytes) disk, and a power brick. The power brick weighs about twice as much as the drive and is the only piece that causes much hesitation. There is a general feeling that 1) it weighs too much, 2) it should support International (50 Hz, 220 volt) voltages, and 3) it could be forgotten or
Even though the product is quite new, Iomega has shown itself more than willing to listen and has offered some thoughtful comments on the power brick. Yes, they admit, it is somewhat large, and they are looking into making it smaller. Yes, it does not support International voltages, but you can get an International power supply as an option. Yes, the power brick is an extra piece — but removing the power supply from the Zip drive has benefits, since this removes a heat source, and also removes the need for a noisy, heavy fan to cope with the heat source.
Buttons? We Don’t Need No Stinking Buttons
Installing a Zip is a snap. Attach the SCSI cable to your Mac. Attach the Zip to the SCSI cable (the Zip has two 25-pin ports, so devices can be daisychained). Set the SCSI address of the Zip to 5 or 6 using the switch on the back of the Zip. (There are no other choices: you must pick 5 or 6.) Use another switch to set or remove termination. Plug the drive into the power brick. Boot your Mac and insert the Zip 100 Tools disk into the drive.
There are a couple things missing, such as an On/ Off button. If the power brick is plugged into the Zip drive, it is on. If it is unplugged, it is off. This strikes me as a bit crude, but Iomega engineers said that most people powered up their machines from a single power strip, so the added expense of including an On/Off switch, which nobody uses, anyway, seemed silly.
Also missing is any indication of the Zip’s religious affiliation. There is a parallel-port version of the Zip drive, which is obviously for the MS-DOS world. But the SCSI version doesn’t mention if it is for a PC or for a Mac. So how can you tell which version you are getting? And the answer is: you get both. If you plug a Zip drive into a Mac and insert the Tools disk, the Zip recognizes it is connected to a Mac and opens a Mac window showing the Mac version of the Zip software set. When plugged into a PC, the Zip Tools disk is recognized as a PC disk, and presents a very different set of tools to the user. This magic is due to formatting the Tools disk as half Mac, half PC. When the disk is first inserted, the rest of the drive is formatted appropriately.
Included with the drive is a nice selection of software. Bernoulli fans will discover the latest version of Workshop, !omega’s utility for formatting and administering Bernoulli disk drives. A similar utility, Iomega Tools, takes care of formatting and read/write protecting Zip drives, and the Zip installation utility places this right in your Apple menu if you are running System 7. Iomega Guest is a clever utility with one purpose: double-click on it, and it will load a driver for the Zip drive into memory, eliminating any need to install something unusual to read a Zip drive. As the name suggests, the purpose of the utility is to temporarily add a Zip drive to a” guest” computer without modifying the System Folder in any way. All of these utilities come with electronic documentation in the form of stand-alone DOCmaker applications, which makes it much harder to lose the documentation.
Non-Iomega software includes a “starter” version of Disk Dup Pro, designed to create one-drive backups of Zip disks (or Bernoulli cartridges). Personal Backup, a Control Panel-based backup and file synchronization utility from SunStar Publishing, is included, as is a “starter” version of Easy Labels, for creating detailed labels of your data-crammed Zip disks. Finally, there is a “starter” version of Virtual Disk, a clever Control Panel utility that tracks everything you save to a Zip and stores it in an on-line “virtual disk.” All of the entries are aliased, so you can do a search for “Letter to Bill” and quickly discover it is stored on Zip 100-39, “GatesofHell.”
Performance
The drive’s speed is decently fast, if unspectacular. With an access time of 28 ms, it is slower than a Bernoulli but faster than all but the newest Syquest drives. You should have no difficulty playing any but the most demanding QuickTime movies directly from the drive. In fact, Iomega includes a Macromedia Director-based tour that incorporates Quick Time clips right on the Tools disk. Pi President Lorin Evans, who (false) claims to know nothing about Macs and instead professes (true) love for Apple II computers, also discovered the Zip works on an Apple IIGS. If you have an Apple IIGS with a RAMfast SCSI card, you can successfully use it with the Zip. Lorin wanted to try it with other configurations, but was thwarted in this endeavor when I swiped the drive for this review.
Note, however, that the utilities included with the Zip do not offer any support for the Apple IIGS, and in fact post error messages on screen if you try to run them on something older than a Mac SE, or on any machine not running System 7. Iomega probably figures there aren’t too many people like Lorin out there; they admitted they’d never given much thought to connecting a Zip to something that wasn’t running System 7.
There are a number of nice touches that make a Zip a pleasure to use. If you shut down or reboot, the Zip automatically ejects the cartridge, as it should. There is an eject button on the front, but this is for Those Other Computers, and is ignored on a Mac. But if you reboot with the Option key held down, the Zip will stay mounted, allowing you to, among other things, boot from a Zip drive for such tasks as software installations and maintenance chores.
Zip disks are larger than a 3.5″ diskette, and thicker, which means they won’t fit in a standard 3.5″ storage box. But a regular 3.5″ diskette will fit in a Zip, which is bad, since it could damage the Zip’s read/ write heads. So Iomega designed a beveled-jewel window for their Zip disks as a safety feature. If you try to shove something in a Zip drive that doesn’t have the special window and only Zip disks have this special window-the read/ write heads will stay safely tucked out of the way, avoiding damage.
In the “don’t ask, don’t tell” department, the Zip doesn’t care about orientation. Iomega sticks rubber feet on both the ”bottom” and the “edge” of the drive, so you can have it sit flat or up on end; it works either way. In fact, while playing with it at the Pi office, someone accidentally knocked it off the desk, setting it swinging back and forth from the SCSI cable. The Zip didn’t care, blithely loading and saving files without pause. (Note: this test was done by trained, if clumsy, professionals. Iomega would probably not recommend this, if we ever told them about it, and we have no intention of doing so.)
Recommendations
Should you get a Zip drive? For most people, the answer is,” sure, why not?” Some users actually have lots of free space on their hard drives; I’ve never met such a person, but they are rumored to exist. These people may not need a Zip. Other users may need archival-quality storage, and the slower, more expensive 3.5″ optical disks might be a better choice. Among other things, optical disks are immune to erasure by stray magnetic fields, which might be a consideration if you are storing data for a decade or so.
But for most “normal” Mac users, the Zip looks like a winner. Mac Warehouse is selling the Zip drive for $199.95, including one cartridge, with extra cartridges going for $19 .95, or $149.95 if you buy 10 disks at once. That works out to $350for1.1 billion bytes of storage, and it will all fit in your briefcase with room to spare. In contrast, 1,100 high-density floppies would cost more than twice as much, and might comfortably fit in a van.
1,100 Megabytes for $248
Special Offer: between May 1, 1995 and May 31, 1995, Pi members can take advantage of a special offer:
- 1 Zip Drive 100 for $149.00 (includes 1 Zip 100 disk)
- 10 pack of Zip 100 disks for $99.00
- $7.00 shipping and handling for both, plus sales tax.
Conditions: you must be a Washington Apple Pi member. If Zip drives are on back order, backorders will be filled before this special offer, but you can still place your order. You must contact !omega’s DC-area representative, Jan Ruderman, at 703-506-8813; if you call Iomega’s regular number, they will tell you no such special offer exists.
The offer will not be extended, so don’t even think of calling past May 31st.
Iomega Corporation
1821 West Iomega Way Roy
Utah 84067-9977
(801) 778-1000
(800) MY-STUFF
(801) 392-9819 (bulletin board)
E-mail: info@iomega.com