Big Little Discs

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

It was time to retire my old and trusty Macintosh. Blubbering like a boy about to put the family dog to sleep, I lugged the thing into my daughters' room and said goodbye. "You're going to be happier here, feller," I snuffled, patting it on the monitor. And then I remembered: thousands of my e-mail messages were on that machine! My kids might inadvertently delete them, or worse, read them! A quick check determined that my private correspondence weighed in at 80 megabytes. The usual high-density floppy discs, standard 1.44-MB diskettes, were useless--it would take 60 of them to copy my stuff. I needed...ultra-high-density floppies.

There is no such generic term (yet) for the storage medium that's quickly replacing the standard floppy. Instead, each of the competitors in this booming market is selling its own thing: ultra-high-density floppies by many other names. You've probably heard of the Zip drive, for instance, the purple-hued peripheral from Iomega that reads and writes to 100-meg removable discs. Lots of people use Zips at my office. So, a few months ago, instead of doing a lick of research, I bolted out to the nearest Staples and picked up a Zip drive for $150. It wasn't a mistake--nor was it an educated buy. I hadn't heard of the more capacious and competitively priced SuperDisk by Imation, nor did I know about Sony's upcoming (and as yet unpriced) HiFD and Caleb Technology's UHD 144 (less than $100). I didn't bother to look into Iomega's Jaz (less than $300) or SyQuest's sub-$200 SparQ--gigabyte-size storage media that behave more like external hard drives than floppies.

The market for ultra-high-density floppy drives is doubling every year, according to Bob Amatruda, a senior analyst at International Data Corp. That's partly thanks to the hordes of folks who are buying sub-$1,000 PCs that come with teensy hard drives. Likewise, as more people download games, music and video from the Web, they're fast running out of room. Some 7.8 million ultra-high-density floppy drives will sell in 1998, IDC predicts.

So what should you buy? That depends on what you need. The pricing and performance of the drives and storage medium--as I show on my website at time.com this week--make for good comparison shopping. While the Zip is easy to set up and has a commanding lead in the marketplace, it won't run traditional floppies. If you have a drawerful of 1.44s, you'll need a separate floppy drive to read them. The SuperDisk drive has its own 120-MB discs but can run regular old floppies too. And if you can wait until late fall, you will have even more options: Sony and Caleb separately announced last week that they'll start shipping their own ultra-high-density drives, which will also be able to run standard floppies. Sony's entry, the HiFD, uses a 200-MB disc. Caleb, a smaller company, based in Boulder, Colo., will use 144-MB discs--I guess because they're exactly 100 times as big as traditional floppies.

If I could have waited, I would have bought the HiFD. The drive I saw was fast enough to handle full-motion video, which was impressive; and with 200 MB of space, you would have room for nearly 20 minutes of it--or 88 copies of War and Peace. But Sony had promised the drive by this spring. And when you're hiding e-mail from your kids, who can wait?

See Josh's more detailed review of ultra-high-density floppy drives at time.com E-mail him at jquit@well.com Watch him and Anita Hamilton on CNNfn's Digital Jam, at 7:30 p.m. E.T. on Wednesdays.