Comments--TEAC USB Floppy And Iomega USB Zip

1999–2004July 20, 1999Macs Only!Editorial
I haven't had the time to complete a full review of these two products. However, I have used both attached to my B&W G3/300 via an Interex USB 5-port hub for the past month for a variety of tasks and both work very well.

The TEAC USB floppy drive is marketed by Yano Electric in Japan where I picked it up. It reads and writes to standard 1.44 MB Mac and PC diskettes. I use Apple's USB Mass Storage Support v1.3.5 driver so it does not need a separate driver for the simple tasks performed so far. I have not tried a multiple disk application installation.

The Iomega USB Zip drive uses 100 MB Zip carts and it too has performed flawlessly. The only annoyance is that it doesn't have an on/off switch so the LED burns constantly but this is not really a problem. Iomega provides a great set of software tools with the Zip.

I timed several actions on the two USB drives and a SyQuest SyJet 1.5 attached to an Orange Micro 930U SCSI card just to illustrate their speeds. The time was measured to mount the disk's image on the desktop after the media is inserted and to copy several files (124K and 1 MB) and a 41 MB folder of 1138 files from the B&W's hard disk to the USB drives and the SyJet. The reverse is slightly faster. The times are:

Time in Seconds
Action TEAC USB Floppy - 1.44 MB Iomega USB Zip - 100 MB SyQuest SyJet - 1.5 GB
Mount Disk Icon
6
5
16
124 K File
10
2
1
1 MB File
57
5
2
41 MB Folder
n/a
215
47

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