By Gary Kirchherr
When I first wrote about Iomega's Zip drive 10 weeks ago, the jury still was out on whether this invention was the best new storage medium since the 3 1/2-inch floppy disk. The 1-pound drive and its 3 3/4-inch cartridges that hold almost 100 megabytes still were being compared with Syquest's EZ135 drive and 135-megabyte cartridges. The Zip's main advantages are the smaller physical size of the drive and cartridges, and the floppy-disk-like ease of use. The EZ135's selling points are the superior data-transfer speed of its cartridges, and their greater storage capacity.
The jury of public opinion has rendered its verdict in the marketplace, and the Zip has won hands down.
Consider these developments just last month:
-More than 4,000 retailers voted the Zip Drive the Millenium Hardware of the Year award in the Product Excellence Category at the Retail Vision trade show.
-Rumors are circulating that IBM is considering using the Zip drives in a pending upgrade of its Aptiva personal computers. Packard-Bell also allegedly is considering using the Zip drive in some of its models. The drives already are options on some Hewlett-Packard and Micron PCs, as well as certain models of Power Computing, a Macintosh-clone manufacturer.
-Iomega announced it's working on a laptop-computer version of the Zip drive, and plans eventually to cut the price of the drive in half, to about $100.
This news comes on the heels of ringing endorsements from both MacUser and Macworld magazines in their respective March issues. Macworld's World Class Awards named the Zip drive the best personal-storage product, noting that for years, cheap and easy portable storage has been elusive - until now. "Iomega has done it, transforming an existing technology - the floppy drive - into a much better one."
MacUser was even more enthusiastic in its summary of why the Zip drive was best personal-storage product and Hardware Product of the Year in its Editors' Choice Awards. "This simple, unassuming, removable-cartridge storage system is the answer to most users' long-standing need for an inexpensive, reliable, easy-to-manage way to infinitely expand their storage capacity," MacUser said. "The Zip drive is a no-brainer buy."
Not so the EZ135, apparently. Macworld relegated the Syquest product to "finalist" status. The EZ135 didn't even do that well in the MacUser awards.
Some owners of EZ135s aren't taking too kindly to the unfavorable comparisons between their drive and Iomega's, complaining that the computer media are downplaying the EZ135's advantages - speed and storage capacity. MacUser caught some grief for its January issue's review of the EZ135 that compared it unfavorably with the Zip drive. But arguments like the following letter-writer's fall flat: "If you can handle an extra button and lever and can avoid dropping your cartridges, you'll have a drive that has a third more storage than and twice the speed of the Zip."
The "extra button and lever," so familiar to users of older Syquest drives, are hardly irrelevant factors. In fact, they are a pain in the neck. And now on top of that, I also have to be careful not to drop the Syquest cartridges - a point in the review not even disputed by the EZ135 owner.
The knockout blow in the fight for supremacy, though is the cartridge's physical real-estate demands. Both the Zip and EZ135 promote their products as storage mediums. So the advantage should go to the product whose storage medium takes up the least space. And this contest isn't even close - compared with Zip cartridges, the EZ135's are huge.
In the continuous battle for technology standards, many bemoan the failure of superior products - the Betamax and Macintosh OS come to mind. But as far as Zip-vs.-EZ135, the better product clearly won.