From...

November 16, 1998
Web posted at: 7:46 PM PT

by Rex Farrance

(IDG) -- Iomega's Zip drive has long ruled the world of removable-media storage. But lately, the head that wears the crown has been uneasy indeed, with new competitors, including Caleb, Samsung, and Sony aiming to knock Zip off with competitive super-floppies. In a recent article (see Sony/Caleb link at right), we reported that Sony’s new $200 HiFD will ship this quarter with 200MB of capacity, relatively quick performance, and compatibility with 1.44MB floppies. Imation is also expected to ship a faster version of its SuperDisk drive by year’s end.

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But Iomega, not to be caught napping, offered its response Monday at Comdex.

Iomega's just-announced 250MB Zip drive is set to take over as the capacity leader -- beating its largest competitor by 50MB. And while the new Zip drive -- like its 100MB older sibling--lacks compatibility with 1.44MB floppies, it is compatible with the approximately 100 million 100MB Zip disks that have already been sold.

Iomega says it will ship the 250MB Zip drive before the end of the year for an estimated street price of $199. The company says 250MB Zip disks will sell for as low as about $100 in 6-packs ($16.65 each). Iomega says that it also intends to keep the 100MB Zip drive and disk on the market. Initial models will be parallel port and SCSI external drives, with internal EIDE and SCSI models to come in the first quarter of the new year.

The company claims that performance of the new drive and media should improve a bit on the current batch of Zip drives (except for the faster Zip Plus drive, which is being discontinued). However, the new drive will be significantly slower when writing to the older 100MB disks -- because of the head design changes needed to increase per-disk capacity.