Removable Cartridge Drives trying for a Comeback

With much larger capacities, Iomega, Quantum and ProStor are offering new removable cartridge hard drives. Some time ago the Iomega Zip drive at 100MB came on virtually every pro computer. We used SyQuest external drives with 44MB removable cartridges for many years and still have several of the drives. This New York Times article by David Pogue covers the details of the recent reincarnations with cartridges of 40GB to 160GB.

They are convenient but pricey. Only the Iomega Rev comes close to the price of regular hard drives with its 70GB cartridges. They cost $270 for a five-pack or $54 a piece or 77 cents per gigabyte. A good 250GB regular hard drive costs well under $100 or less than 40 cents per gigabyte. The Iomega Rev works with Macs and has USB 2.0 and Firewire connections. [Dana Baggett]