Iomega has long been known for providing large-capacity removable media solutions, a famous example being the Bernoulli series of drives. But in the last year Iomega has Jazzed up their image and brought out a line of modern, snazzy and one might even say sexy looking peripherals that appeal to the home and small business user for a variety of reasons. The Zip drive is one of these.

The Zip drive is Iomega's suggestion to replace the lagging and sorely inadequate 1.44meg 3.5" floppy drives we've become so familiar with. The external model we reviewed has a deep blue/indigo case, curved and sportily designed, built to lay horizontally or propped up on its side. It's available in a version that plugs into the Parallel Port in the back of your computer (with a printer pass-through), or in a SCSI model that offers greater throughput for computers equipped with a SCSI port. We reviewed the Parallel Port version that, despite its slower throughput, offers much wider portability.

OS/2 Support

Installation is also somewhat awkward, requiring you to figure out the difference between ADD and OAD drivers. ADD drivers are OS/2's own format and you'll see several such drivers in your CONFIG.SYS like "BASEDEV=IBM1FLPY.ADD" for floppy drives, and "BASEDEV=IBM1S506.ADD" for most IDE hard drives. OAD are what Iomega calls "Open Architecture Drivers."

All you really need to know is this: If you have the SCSI version of the Zip drive you need the ADD drivers, if you have the Parallel Port version you need the OAD ones. Both are shipped in the same file or on the same disks you download/order from Iomega.

Documentation for these drivers come in self-displaying .EXE programs. There are no ASCII text files you can load into your favorite editor, although the browser program does allow you to print out the manuals and jump to certain topics with a pop-up menu. These manuals are written on the technical side and insist on describing the difference between OAD and ADD drivers at the top of each file, so cryptically in fact that most won't be any the wiser even after reading them three or four times through.

The actually process though, after you've figured it out, is easy enough for anyone to be able to do it. The drivers install with the "Install Device Drivers" program in OS/2's System Setup folder and only require you to run a onetime utility that scans for the Zip drive and assigns a letter to it.

The installation program will place a new drive object in your 'Drives' folder. You can make a shadow of this on your desktop. Right clicking on this drive object will reveal a few extras in the popup menu (GIF, 6K), most notably 'Eject disk' and 'Lock disk'. They do exactly what they say! In a Macintosh-style maneuver, the Zip drive will whir and spit out the Zip disk after clicking 'eject', and 'Lock' will prevent the disk from being removed either by the 'Eject' command or by pressing the Eject button on the front of the unit itself. (You must 'Unlock' the disk using a simple command line utility to Eject it.)

Benefits

We also discovered that the Zip drive can be shared between two or more computers by using a simple, cheap cable switching box. These boxes are normally used to share a printer between computers when you don't want a full-blown LAN. By connecting the Zip drive and your computers to this box you can 'hot swap' the drive on the fly without rebooting either machine. We tried this method to move large files and directories from one of our home office computers to the other.

The speed of a Zip drive depends on the version you purchase. SCSI Zip drives can get up to 60 megabytes per minute of throughput, Parallel Port versions get only 20. Access time on both versions is about 29 milliseconds, about the same as entry-level hard drives were 5 years ago but still much faster than regular floppy drives. Speeds like this make it quite feasible to use a Zip drive to store documents on, plus games or programs that don't perform much disk access. When benchmarked with IOStone (iostone.zip on hobbes) the parallel port version of the Zip drive scored 2230. In comparison, an HPFS formatted hard drive with 10ms access time can usually reach 40,000 iostones or more (higher is better).

Media is cheap too, a 100 megabyte Zip disk runs about US$15 to US$20 each at the time of this writing and are also available in 3-packs and 10-packs (Iomega calls these "Gig-o-packs"). These prices make it quite reasonable to have one disk for each client or project you're working on. As I do subcontracting work for a web development company I can bring entire web sites in on one Zip disk instead of multiple 1.4 meg disks. If you're running low on hard disk space you can unload infrequently used programs and files onto a Zip disk and free up some room.

Since Iomega was essentially reinventing the floppy they took the opportunity to add some features that should have been there from the beginning. Write protection is no longer achieved by physically sliding a tab on the disk, it's software based. You can give a disk read and write protection with a password, making it ideal for storing sensitive documents. Disks can also be temporarily unprotected, so you can write to them normally but they become protected again as soon as the disk is ejected.

HPFS Formatted Disks

FAT formatted disks can be freely swapped during an OS/2 session with only one problem, apparently FixPak 17 'broke' the ability for OS/2 to store Extended Attributes (EA's) larger than 1k for files saved to the Zip disk.

Merlin Compatibility

Conclusions

Iomega Zip Drive

$20-$15 for each 100mb removable Zip disk.

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