Rapid storage (Iomega ZIP 100 MB USB)

Member Name: Asylum

Product:	Iomega ZIP 100 MB USB
Date:	25/01/03 (342 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: fast, simple to use, portable

Disadvantages: none

As most people will remember, the only form of media for storing files used to be the humble floppy disk. This was a very decent product in it's time because the size of most files were quite small, allowing a large portion of your data to stored this way.
Even today the floppy can be useful for Excel spreadsheets or Word documents, but with the ever increasing size of files such as audio, photo and video content a larger has become essential.
The current available options are Zip drive, LS120 or CD writer.
A CD writer will offer a very healthy 700 Mb of storage, but requires either a new disk each time you change the content or a Rewitable disk. Even a rewritable disk has obviou disadvantages, to change the data would require formatting the disk and restarting.
An LS120 was a realistic competitor to the Zip drive for a while. This was mainly due to the fact that a LS120 drive will read and write to floppy disks as well as LS120 disks which hold 120 Mb. As a previous owner of one of these drives I found it to be very useful but sadly rather slow to transfer data.
This leaves just one option for regular data storage of moderate size, the Zip drive.
An internal Zip is far cheaper than the USB variety, but choosing the latter can have definite benefits. An external Zip drive is ideal if you possess more than 1 computer, or if you have both desktop and notebook. It also constitutes a very portable item, so you can easily take it along to a friend's home to transfer files to and from their computer.
This is a very fast and easy to use product, and does not even require a separate power source because it is host powered.
Zip disks used to be very expensive, but due to the popularity the cost is falling to a reasonable level now.
Basically the only real downside is that due to the rapidly increasing size of software and files in general the disk is effectively becoming smaller, but this drive will certainly prove to be a useful p
roduct for quite some time yet.

Summary: