USB iMation drive versus USB Zip drive

USB Zip versus USB iMation
Created 11/20/98 by Rob Art Morgan, editor of BARE FEATS

Conclusions

The USB Zip drive is twice as fast as the USB iMation SuperDisk.
The USB Zip drive is only 10% slower than a SCSI Zip drive.
Neither the USB Zip or iMation SuperDrive comes close to the speed of the internal iMac 4 Gig hard drive.
In defense of the iMation SuperDisk, it holds 20MB more than the Zip, reads & writes 1.4MB floppy disks and matches the iMac color scheme more closely.

Just Wondering

I wonder why Iomega didn't just add a USB port to the Zip Plus, making it a three-way-drive (SCSI, parallel, USB).
I wonder why Apple didn't make the CD-ROM hot swappable with a Zip or floppy a la PowerBook.
Before you sell your SCSI Zip drive, you might check into the new USB to SCSI adapter by MicroTech.

Test Equipment & Procedures

The USB Zip and iMation SuperDrive were tested on a Version A iMac with 32MB of RAM.
The external SCSI Zip was run on a 7500 with a 300MHz G3 cpu board.
Both computers ran Mac OS 8.5 with minimal extensions, Virtual Memory ON, File Sharing OFF, Open Transport OFF, NO MathLibMoto, NO Speed Doubler, NO Ram Doubler, 512K Disk Cache setting
The MacBench 5.0 general disk test was used. MacBench is the product of Ziff-Davis. The CD-ROM costs $5 to order.

Thanks go to Iomega for getting me an early model of USB Zip to test. They appeared in the local CompUSA as of today (11/20/98).

Thanks to CompUSA, Honolulu, for letting me test the iMation drive and internal hard drive on the iMac version A in their Integration Lab.

Consult my Hot Deals page for best prices on the above products.

The MacBench 5.0 is the product of Ziff-Davis. The CD-ROM costs $5 to order.

© 1998, 1999 Rob Art Morgan, editor of BARE FEATS
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