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Review of USB Zip 100 (Continued)
by David Yee and Mario Espaņa
Performance
Performance was good. In real-world benchmark testing, the USB Zip drive was anywhere from 2.4 times to 5.4 times faster than the parallel Zip. The internal ATAPI Zip drive was slightly quicker, but note that it uses the much faster IDE interface (5 to 33 Mbyte/Sec) while USB is only capable of 1.2 Mbyte/Sec.
zipusbp1.gif (6475 bytes)
The USB Zip drive also performed much better than the parallel Zip drive in Ziff-Davis' Business Disk WinMark 99, garnering a score of 381 Kbyte/Sec. The ATAPI drive was 20% faster in this benchmark. What's interesting, however, is that the CPU utilization for the USB Zip drive during the test was a mere 7%, soundly besting the other drives. This means that when you copy files to or from the USB Zip drive, your computer will still be free to perform other operations such as printing.
zipusbp2.gif (3188 bytes)

* reported for comparison
zipusbp3.gif (3681 bytes)
* reported for comparison
 
Conclusion
At $149, the USB Zip 100 is $50 more expensive than the parallel Zip drive. But it performs so much better than the parallel Zip that the time and aggravation that could be saved are well worth the extra price. Only get the parallel Zip drive if you need to transfer files between older computers that do not have USB ports. Get the ATAPI Zip if you only work with one computer or the systems you use all have one. Note that, however, it does take up a precious IDE connection that you may need for a second or third hard drive.

What's Cool: No-brainer installation, good performance
What's Not: Requires power supply block, a bit pricey

Installation: 10/10
Performance:   9/10
Price:         7/10
CC Rating: 8.7/10
 
Test System
Pentium II 300, Asus P2B, 64 Mbyte PC 100 SDRAM, IBM DTTA-350840 8.4 GByte Hard Drive, Windows 98, IomegaWare driver ver. 1.0, Intel 82371AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE driver (from Windows 98 CD)