Review: Iomgea USB Zip 100

At a glance, the Iomega USB Zip drive looks quite different than the other external Zip drives. Although the basic shape is the same, the casing of the USB Zip drive is a stylish translucent-blue, designed to emulate the appearance of the Apple iMac. The USB connection located at the back of the drive is tiny, and the supplied silver-ish USB cable is refreshingly thin compared to those clunky parallel and SCSI cables used by other external Zip drives. In addition, the DC power supply block measures just 2" x 1.75" x 1". Its small size means that it can comfortably coexist with other power plugs on conventional power strips. The external Zip drives many of you may have purchased a year or two ago have a much larger power supply block that was merciless in cannibalizing real estate on the surge protector. Note that, however, although the USB specification allows power be delivered from the computer to the USB device, the USB Zip 100 requires too much power and thus the power supply block is still necessary.

1. Plug the power supply block of the USB Zip drive to a free electrical outlet.
2. Connect the correct end of the USB cable to the drive and the other end to the one of the USB ports on the PC.
3. Almost immediately, a dialog box with the message "New Hardware Found - USB Zip 100" appears.
4. Insert the installation CD in the CD-ROM drive, keep clicking the Next button, and voila!, you're done.

Note that you must be running a version of Windows (preferably Windows 98, although Windows OSR 2.1 also works) that supports USB, and of course, your computer must have USB ports and a USB-aware BIOS. Most computers that shipped since mid-1997 should have hardware USB support.

A phenomenon we observed was that when you unplug the USB connection, the Zip drive icon promptly disappears from the My Computer window. Restore the connection, and boom, the icon comes back. Cool. 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. 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.

* reported for comparison * 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.

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)   

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