This product review is strictly the opinion of the reviewer, who is not necessarily a Farba Research employee.

Product:	EZ-135tm Removable Disk
Category:	removable cartridge hard disk
Manufacturer:	Syquest Corporation
Rating:	works just fine
Reviewer:	E. Nicholas Cupery
Review Date:	31 March 1999

Introduction

The Syquest EZ-135 is a removable cartridge hard disk that is available in both external and internal configurations, and with either an IDE or a SCSI interface. The "135" refers to the fact that the cartridge has a formatted capacity of about 135 million bytes.

Pros

• runs very quietly
• spins up quickly
• cartridges are inexpensive (about $15 each)
• no apparent thermal calibration delays

Cons

• runs at yesteryear's ATA speed
• Syquest appears to have closed its doors for good

Discussion

Although not nearly large enough to backup an entire system these days, the Syquest EZ-135 is a great backup medium for one's data. It can only write about 2 megabytes per second tops, but that is enough; this means that one can create a duplicate copy in a minute or two. The modest speed is this device's only drawback; I have been using these EZ-135s for backup for many years now, with nary a problem.

The EZ-135 cartridges are very robust, since they do not contain any drive head mechanism (ie, the heads are part of the drive, not the cartridge). Even better, each blank cartridge comes in a nicely padded case that is very shock-resistent (drops onto concrete seem to be no problem).

The one caveat to remember is that Syquest is apparently gone from the scene for good. Perhaps they were just another victim of the times, or the fact that the vast majority is too stupid to worry much about backup anyway.

Note that Syquest had a follow-up product, the EZ-230^tm, with about double the capacity of the EZ-135. I have not personally tested the EZ-230, but all reports indicate that it is simply a same-quality but higher capacity version of the EZ-135 (and is read/write backwards compatible with the EZ-135). This is not true of Syquest's last removable cartridge drive product, the Sparq^tm; I tried some Sparqs myself (both the internal and the external versions), and sent them all back. The one-gigabyte capacity is nice, but the device uses noisy thermal calibrations periodically to support that capacity.

Conclusion

The Syquest EZ-135 remains a great way to backup your data, even though the company is gone. (You can expect to see terrific deals on this device at computer shows and flea markets, and the cartridges are still available through the normal retail channels.)

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