PERSPECTIVES - DRIVE TIME
As consumer storage needs grow, what options are available to dealers to fulfil demand?
The demand from customers to be able to move large amounts of dataers to fulfil demand? quickly and cheaply has never been greater. And it's not just business customers who are clamouring for additional space - home users are banging down dealers' doors, forcing capacity points ever-upwards, driven on by the need to find a safe home for their digital content.
Users are increasingly aware that the comfort blanket of having a PC with a capacity of 10Gb or more is pretty meaningless when a disk failure strikes. Also, let's not forget that computers, particularly notebooks, are eminently desirable to thieves and burglars. There's little chance of a user retrieving their digital holiday snaps once some tealeaf has flogged their PC down at the local car boot sale.
In business too, there's also increasing frustration. When a client calls and asks for a PC-based copy of the presentation they've just seen, does the author send out a box of 50 floppy disks or email a message that takes an age to download? Enter the reseller.
What this all adds up to is a huge world market for high-capacity removable storage devices. Some of the globe's most profitable businesses are heavily involved in data portability and security. Companies such as Iomega may not be household names to many, but they have made it big by making it bigger - the size of removable storage, that is.
When text documents were the largest things most people had to cope with, the good old floppy disk was a quick and simple way to get files off the computer and on to a safe medium. But in the age of the internet download and multimedia applications, floppies have been left way behind. The problem is one of size and, in data storage, it really does matter.
A standard 3.5in floppy disk can hold up to 1.44Mb of data, which is enough for a quite a few average-size documents, but not much else. A medium resolution image from a digital camera will easily take up twice that space, while the days of programs distributed solely on those loveable little plastic squares are long gone.
Apple was the first leading manufacturer to acknowledge that the floppy had run its course and produced the groundbreaking iMac without the normal floppy drive. The only problem was that the drive wasn't replaced with anything, leaving users' data trapped inside the computer, or to be squeezed out via the phone line and the internet.
The wisdom of this approach has been the subject of heated debate, but the iMac has clearly given a further boost to the removable storage market as various companies have rushed to fill the void. And there are ever more storage systems available for the PC.
With so many options available, it helps to divide the drives into categories based on how much they can store, rather than how they do it. It's results that matter, not how they are achieved.
For home users, the starting point is the next-generation floppy drive.
A good example of this is Iomega's Zip drive, which hit the streets in 1995, offering 100Mb of storage on disks slightly larger than the old floppy disks. This format is perfect for securing projects, valuable documents and exchanging data.
The next step up used to be occupied by a variety of drives from companies such as Nomai and Syquest, weighing in at anywhere from between 200Mb and 750Mb in terms of storage capacity. But cutthroat competition has seen both these companies swallowed up by Iomega.
In their place comes a huge range of recordable and affordable CD drives.
The choice is between CD-Recordable (CD-R) drives, which can write on a CD only once, and CD-Rewritable (CD-RW) drives, capable of writing to special CDs again and again.
Moving up the scale again, we find devices that can almost replace the hard drive, such as Iomega's Jaz drive. Then we come to the odds and ends of the removable storage market: DVD-Ram drives, which may or may not become an industry standard, and devices such as Amacom's Flip Disk, which is a portable hard disk for notebooks.
Finally, there are the industrial-strength tape drives that have been around for years. Most storage manufacturers sell some kind of tape drive for home use, usually starting with a capacity point of about 10Gb.
These are almost exclusively for data security and backup, rather for than exchanging files.
For the user, finding the most suitable medium among the huge variety of devices out there can be a daunting task. For the reseller, helping the customer match their needs with their budget, the opportunities could be considerable. PC Dealer, in conjunction with VNU's European Labs, examines some of the options available.
Next generation
This category of the removable storage market is dominated by Iomega, purveyor of the Zip drive. Because of its popularity, four versions of the 100Mb drive were put under the spotlight. Zip drives start at less than £90 - cheaper still if a customer orders one when buying a PC - and offer a decent amount of storage for most non-professional tasks. The media are affordable - single disks cost less than £10 and multi-packs bring the unit price down further.
First on the test bench was the Baby Zip, which is supplied in the UK by Amacom, and is made for use with notebooks. This slim-line Zip drive comes in an attractive grey housing designed to match most notebooks.
Initially, the Baby Zip failed to work, which is unusual for PC Card devices. PC Cards fit into one of the slots on the side of a notebook and should be instantly recognised by the computer. However, it wasn't until several different notebook models had been tried that the drive was finally recognised. And when it was, it performed rather well, completing all benchmarking tests in a respectable time for an external drive.
On the downside, £175 is a bit steep for what is essentially four-year-old technology. The internal version of the Zip drive is becoming commonplace on mid-range PCs and, at just less than half the price of the Baby Zip, represents good value for money. Users will need to have a spare 3.5in drive bay on their PCs and a screwdriver to open up the box. Installation isn't terribly difficult and will save customers a considerable amount of cash. A dealer could perform this simple operation on behalf of the customer in a matter of minutes.
For those who operate on a need-to-know basis, the IDE interface is a speedy standard for hooking up drives of every kind. The best-selling Zip drive has been the external version, which attaches to a PC through its parallel, or printer, port.
The beauty of the external Zip lies in its portability. This is due to two factors. First, and most obviously, it is small, weighing about half a kilo. Second, every Zip drive comes with Iomega's Guest software on floppy disk, so there's a use for floppies after all. This allows the drive to be quickly and easily hooked up to any PC. If a computer can use a printer, it can use a parallel port Zip drive.
On the downside, the parallel Zip is too slow for users with a lot of data. The SCSI version is considerably faster, although not tested here, as few PCs come ready for SCSI connectivity. Most users will need to shell out an extra £50 or so to upgrade their PC to use SCSI peripherals.
The latest big thing in PC connectivity is the Universal Serial Bus (USB) port, which is designed for fast data transfer and easy set-up. It is common to both PCs and Apple Macs, meaning the Zip USB can be used on either. This is particularly useful if a customer needs to transfer data from one to the other without the benefit of a computer network, such as you might find in a modern office.
On test, Iomega's USB drive was a snap to set up - just plug and play, folks. For once, that phrase really rang true - the drive was detected, and Windows 98 sorted out the software nitty-gritty in a flash. The speed results were good, although not spectacular.
But there are, of course, alternatives, the SuperDisk from Imation being one of the main rivals.
The SuperDisk conforms to the LS-120 standards for 120Mb drives that are backwards compatible with old floppy disks. In other words, it can read and write 1.44Mb floppies as well as its own 120Mb disks. This means users don't need to have both drives taking up valuable space on their PC.
The SuperDisk tested was the external parallel port version, which is the first such LS-120. Problems were apparent from the outset, with the drive's front panel breaking off. This seems to be down to bad design, as it is secured by a few brittle plastic clips.
Next, the device failed to make itself known to the test computer. It transpired this was because Imation has yet to upgrade its drivers to fully support Windows 98. This doesn't mean the SuperDisk won't work under Microsoft's latest operating system, it just means users can't get the most out of it as the speed acceleration software is for Windows 95 only.
Naturally, the results in the controlled Windows 98 test environment showed the SuperDisk to be very slow. Running the tests under Windows 95 also disappointed - the accelerator is really more of a deceiver. It claims files have been copied to the disk, when in fact they have only been written to the PC's hard disk. Try to shut down the computer at this point and users will be in for a bit of a wait. The so-called speed acceleration software must first finish copying the data.
The bottom line is that the SuperDisk has to be seen as a direct replacement for the floppy drive if it is to have as long a shelf life. It has already sold about six million units and penetrated 60 per cent of the iMac market, but in this roundup it was just too slow to truly impress.
Middle of the road
Alone in the middleweight division is - surprise, surprise - yet another Iomega drive. The Zip 250 is the latest incarnation of the 100Mb Zip drive and uses disks that hold - you guessed it - 250Mb of data.
At various times there have been other drives with similar capacities.
Some just haven't caught on at all, others have had technical problems and been recalled, while the rest have been swallowed up by the mighty Iomega.
There isn't a great deal to say about this drive - the parallel port model tested looks like the old one, but with curvy edges. As with all the Zip drives, it is sturdy and built to last. The 250Mb capacity is just about the right size for backing up all the data files from one application, perhaps email and newsgroup archives for example. Test results showed the speed to be slightly faster than for the regular parallel Zip drive.
The disks have a lower cost per megabyte of storage - about 6p per Mb in this case. The 250 can read 100Mb disks in its sleep, but of course the old Zip can't read 250Mb disks. That could be a bit of an obstacle in the way of the Zip 250's progress. If customers want to share their Zip-based data with any of the 20 million Zip users out there, they're going to have to stick to the 100Mb disks. Buying a 250Mb drive just to do that seems a little bit pointless.
CD or not CD?
Up the data storage ladder comes the 650Mb CD. Four CD-RW drives were tested, each packing a lot of data onto its shiny surface - data that can be written, erased and written over again. Dealers should be aware, however, that, for technical reasons, the majority of CD drives made before about 1997 are unable to read CDs created by the updated drives, although they are likely to be in the minority by now.
It should also be noted that all the CD drives we've looked at here require users or dealers to get busy with a screwdriver, opening up their PCs and fitting them into an appropriate drive bay. It's hardly rocket science, but for a customer, the prospect of having to venture inside their PC might be enough to put some people off.
Every CD-RW is described by three figures: its read speed, write speed and re-write speed - the higher the numbers, the better the performance is likely to be. The first unit, from Cyberdrive, has the splendid statistics of 6x2x2.
At just £152, the Cyberdrive CDRW602, is the cheapest CD-RW on show here and comes all the way from Germany. Cheap it may be, but cheerful it ain't.
The CD-writing software is about as efficient as catching water in a net - it's just too badly thought out. The manual doesn't inspire confidence either, with outdated instructions covered up by sticky labels bearing updated information.
CDs will always perform writing tasks as they should do - it's just the way the technology works - and so the speed results were as expected, apart from minor differences due to the software. At the same speed rating as the Cyberdrive is a similar offering from French company Nomai. Did we point out it is now owned by Iomega?
The Gallic-flavoured 680.RW has the same stats as the German drive and is available for only a few pounds more. It is slightly better constructed than the CDRW602 and, as with all four drives in this category, couples with the PC via an internal IDE interface. The software is much better and is actually user friendly - for example, it lets data be copied to a CD without making the user jump through hoops first.
Hewlett Packard's CD-Writer Plus 8100i and Sony's CRX100E-RP can both read data at 24-speed, write it at quad-speed and re-write at double-speed.
The much higher read speed makes these drives a far better bet in our opinion. Try installing a large piece of software, such as Microsoft Office, and it will become clear. The HP CD-RW comes with superb software for handling files and getting them out of the PC and on to disk. It is a joy to use - if only all applications were this simple.
Unfortunately, compared with the Sony drive, there's a £70 premium to be paid for the privilege. What's more, Sony's drive uses CD Text, which electronically labels the title and track names of audio CDs created on it. The CRX100E-RP is good value for money at £229 and is our pick of the CD-RWs.
Big boys
Beyond CDs, we venture into the land of the gigabyte - that's two to the power of 10, or 1,024 Mbs. With that amount of storage, the Jaz drives are aimed at users who need to make their data secure, rather than portable.
Two versions of the Jaz were tested, the original 1Gb version - which subsequent to testing is no longer being manufactured - and the latest 2Gb incarnation. The higher-capacity 2Gb Jaz is the same size as many hard disks of a year or so ago, and both sizes are almost as fast as a hard disk, too.
The drives have the same familiar construction as their little brothers but, inside, the 2Gb version has a faster Ultra SCSI interface. The 2Gb unit can still read 1Gb disks, so there's no fear of being lumbered with a white elephant, especially as uptake has already been brisk. In spite of the manufacturer's claims that the bigger Jaz would be faster, we actually found it was slightly slower in our tests, although both drives still performed superbly.
If a PC has an Ultra SCSI card, Windows recognises the Jaz automatically, otherwise a suitable card will have to be bought. Alternatively, the included Traveller adapter means the Jaz can be attached to the parallel port of any PC. This will greatly slow performance - a bit like forcing Alex Higgins to play left-handed with nothing but a cup of tea to sustain him.
Odds and ends
At 3.2Gb of uncompressed storage, the Flipdisk from Amacom is a little device that punches well above its weight. Inside its sleek blue case is a hard disk that can be made to store up to 6.4Gb of data, using Windows' built-in disk compression feature DriveSpace.
Flipdisk differs from the rest here, by not taking replacement disks or tapes. Once it is full, another Flipdisk has to be bought. It is primarily for users who use notebook computers extensively, with only the occasional recourse to a desktop PC.
To this end, it has an extending PC Card connector - sometimes known as PCMCIA - for the laptop, and can mate with a desktop through its parallel port and a special cable. When not needed, the PC Card folds underneath the drive itself.
In testing, the Flipdisk scorched through the data obstacle course laid before it like a hard disk should. But on a notebook, it was considerably slower and finished in the middle of the pack.
Where this really scores is portability - it is very easy to move data from a notebook to desktop and back. There's room for the entire operating system if required. Unfortunately, we considered it too pricey at £327.
Hot off the LaCie press comes one of the first DVD-Ram drives to be seen in this country. The internal version tested can hold a massive 5.2Gb on a one double-sided writable DVD. The read-only DVD drives can currently be found on most the most recent mid-range PCs and are tipped to be the next big leap forward in software and multimedia distribution.
But there is a slight problem with DVD-Ram - there are three, incompatible DVD-writer technologies and it is unclear which will come out on top.
All are fully rewritable.
In spite of that, the LaCie drive is a good performer and, at about half a penny per megabyte, is a cheap option. It works just like an extra hard disk, albeit with a rather expensive initial cost.
We've got it taped
Finally, we headed for data heaven and checked out tape drives with a capacity of up to 30Gb. Tapes traditionally offer a very low cost per megabyte and are best for backup and other tasks where speed isn't everything.
Depending on the software that is being used, some tape drives let users use them directly as if they were extra hard disks. However, this can be very slow, as access to data on the tape is sequential, rather than random - the tape has to be wound back and forth past the read head.
One drive that can be used directly is the 10Gb DittoMax Pro from Iomega, although the manual advises using it simply as a backup device if using Windows 98. Its FlashFile software sets aside 125Mb on each tape for quick access, which appears as a drive letter under Windows. The backup and restore software is adequate, doing its job at a little slower than a snail's pace.
HP's Colorado 14Gb is an odd-looking device when it has a tape in its mouth - it doesn't go all the way in and reminded us of a snake trying to swallow an antelope. Performance was good for a tape drive and the backup application is particularly easy to use.
The only internal tape drive tested was the Onstream 30Gb. We expected this monster drive to be a little faster as a consequence of its IDE connection, but we were astonished at the results. When backing up, the software does exactly as it is supposed to do - squirreling data away safely - but does so at breakneck speed. This is no ordinary tape drive: the speed on both reading from and writing to the tape is comparable to that of an internal Zip drive.
As we've already said, speed isn't a significant factor when backing up entire systems, as tapes are designed to do. However, the Onstream drive's speed brings another dimension to tape and opens up the possibility of using it as a complement to a hard disk. Throw in storage costs of a penny for 10Mb and it becomes a very attractive option.
Conclusion
Recommending a drive to a customer depends to a large extent on what they need it for. If customers want to combine the ability to share data between PCs and friends or colleagues with near-hard-disk functionality, then the Jaz drive is a clear winner. As an archiving medium, Jaz disks are slightly too expensive for our liking.
For backup and portability in one shiny, happy bundle, dealers would be advised to recommend a good CD-RW, such as the Sony CRX100E-RP. Writable CDs are cheap and every PC these days has at least a CD-Rom drive.
And finally, if users need a drive to be a jack of all trades, the Onstream tape drive is an excellent option to recommend. It allows an entire hard disk to be backed up at the press of a button and is fast enough to have files on hand just when needed.
This article originally appeared in Computeractive
DRIVING TEST
All the storage devices were tested in a controlled Windows 98 environment on a PC with a Pentium II 400MHz processor. The exceptions were the SuperDisk, which had to be tested under Windows 95, the Baby Zip, which is designed exclusively for notebook PCs, and the Flipdisk, which is made for desktop PCs and notebooks.
The results (see table, page 68) show the time taken to write test files and then read them back from the drives. The times include all overheads, such as start-up and seek times. Our test files are a mixed bag adding up to about 90Mb. They include small documents and large multimedia files, representing what a typical user may need to store externally. Tape drives were tested without compression to give an indication of their true speed.
FEEL THE NEED THE SPEED
Results on
Results on laptop parallel port of PC
Reading Writing Reading Writing
file (sec) file (sec) file (sec) file (sec)
Amacom Baby Zip 227.5 197.2
Iomega Zip Internal 130 121
Iomega Zip Parallel 256 247
Iomega Zip USB 143 99
Imation SuperDisk 434 521
Iomega Zip 250 245 225
Cyberdrive CDRW 602 140 470
Nomai 680.RW 119 425
Hewlett Packard CD-Writer 87 200
Sony CRX100E-RP 60 195
Iomega Jaz 1Gb 56 54
Iomega Jaz 2Gb 57 76
Amacom Flipdisk 186 170
LaCie DVD-Ram 87 200
Iomega DittoMax Pro 827 800
Onstream DI30 122 176