| Product: |
Iomega ZIP 250 MB USB Powered |
| Date: |
24/10/01 (229 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Portable, high-capacity, compact
Disadvantages: Expensive, Media expensive
Since I took up digital photography earlier in the year, I have been increasingly worried about losing my computer files. It's relatively easy to back-up a few word-processed documents or a few hundred e-mails because you can use floppy disks for the small sizes of most text-based documents, but when it comes to hundreds of large digital photographs it becomes a different matter. My mind was concentrated on the problem when after a recent family event including a canal boat trip and a restaurant meal at which lots of photographs had been taken, a couple of days later I had an accident with a glass of lager and the keyboard on my laptop computer. Fortunately on that occasion the situation was recoverable but I realised that my wife would not be pleased to discover that all our family photographs from the year 2001 onwards had been lost due to me spilling beer on the keyboard.
I began to look around for a suitable back-up device. Many people seem to be going for CD writers/re-writers these days but I actually required something which would allow me to add and delete files and sometimes to change them in transit. I did not want to make permanent records of files on CDs and build up a stock of dozens each with different versions of sets of photographs on them. In fact I was looking for something like a floppy disk drive but with larger capacity.
I was also looking for a machine which could be easily transferred from one computer to another. Not only did I want to back-up my photographs onto disks, I wanted to copy them onto another computer. Speed of data transfer was going to be important because digital photographs can result in very large files, particularly at higher resolutions, and I didn?t want to wait several hours while say 100 photographs were transferred from the computer onto the zip drive. I was pleased to discover that the Iomega zip drives come with a USB port which would make it speedy to transfer files and also easy to mov
e the drive itself from one computer to another (and also to power the drive without the need for another mains connection as mentioned below).
I began to look at the Iomega range of zip drives and realised that these could be the job. In the past Iomega zip drives have come in 100 megabyte format, which is about equivalent to about 70 floppies. However the later versions support 250 megabyte disks equivalent to 173 floppies - and at that size you're getting to a capacity suitable for digital photographs. So after a few days of worrying about the cost of the thing I finally decided to invest in an Iomega Zip 250 megabyte drive "Mobility kit". This consists of the drive itself, a USB lead, three 250 megabyte disks and a nice nylon carry case with room for both the drive itself and one disk . the cost of the mobility kit is about £20 more than buying the disk drive on its own but as the disks cost about £15 each by reckoned it was quite good value .
The drive itself is a very compact device and it has a neat little clip-on stand so it can rest vertically on your desk and take up very little space. Its takes its power from the machine its plugged into, via the USB cable, and this works fine with both my desk-top and my lap-top computers. The publicity material seems to suggest that you need to buy a PC Card connection for a laptop computer but this is not the case, unless your laptop doesn?t have a USB port.
Installing the zip drive is very easy. You just run the installation software from the CD-ROM and then plug in the disk drive. The drive whirrs away to itself for a short time and then when you put a blank disk in it is very easy to format it from the right click menu. I quickly copied about 150 photographs onto the disk and also the source files for three of four websites which I run. These easily fitted onto one disk . Later on I high transferred the zip drive onto my desktop computer and copied the files from
there onto the hard disk it was just as easy .
It would be nice to say there were lots of other things you could do with your Iomega zip drive but basically it does what it says on the box and not a lot else. The software that comes with it is not particularly imaginative and I think some sort of user-friendly back-up management application would be a useful addition. I?d also like a printed manual to go with the drive, but this is provided on the CD ROM for you to read online or print off on your own printer.
If you want a secure way of backing-up fairly large quantities of data the IOMEGA zip drive seems a very good solution to me. It's not cheap but I was unable to find anything quite as good and certainly for ease of use it is difficult to beat .
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