The zip drive I went for was the internal scsi one, cos its fast, cheep, comes with a free scsi interface, fills up a slot in the mini tower, and people can't come round and "borrow" it to easily.

The main reason I finally decided to cough up for a zip drive was when they got them at uni. I have to transfer loads of graphics files between home and uni if I want to work at home, and floppies are a complete nightmare. Before zip the usual scenario was to .ARJ the file onto 10 disks, take it into uni, reassemble on a peecee, copy to peecee user space, find a mac that can access your mac and peecee user space at the same time, copy the file over, then finally find another mac to load your (by now corrupted) work onto. So you can appreciate why I'm quite chuffed with it. They did have Syquest drives before, but they're a bit pricey if you ask me.

Inside the egg carton style box you'll find the zip drive already fitted into its 5.25" mounting frame, you can strip this off to put it into a 3.5" bay. The drive and the 5.25" mounting plate are both in zip-drive-navy-blue, which looks quite cool. Better than hearing-aid-cream colour anyway.

You also get a basic ISA SCSI-2 interface. It's only got one internal ribbon connector, so adding external drives could be tricky. It's good enough for an internal rom-writer though, if not a 10 gig ultra scsi AV hard drive. Oh, and it has Adaptec chips on it, which is always a good sign.

You also get the envelope full of software and manuals. You get manuals for all the 3 varieties of zip drives, each in 3 or 4 languages, so there's only about 10 pages relevant to you, out of this thick wad of books. What there is though is very clear and helpful. You also get a floppy for peecee and one for mac, a zip disk, and a bag of screws.

Installation is fairly straight forward, just screw it into a spare drive, plug in the SCSI card, and link em up. Software-wise I had to wrestle with the plug and pray settings for a while to get the scsi card set up and recognised. Then you run a program from floppy which temporarily enables the zip drive, then you can install the full software from the zip disk (there's about 20 megs worth)

In use the drive is not bad, but nothing spectacular, just a sec... 26 seconds to write a 16 meg video file, and 22 seconds to read it again. So in practice it doesn't quite live up to the claims of over 1mb/second transfer, but its not bad, probably equivalent to a 6x CD drive.

100 meg per disk is starting to sound a bit small these days, especially if you want to start backing up your hard drive. I think the zip drive could become the floppy drive of the future, with more and more manufacturers including them as standard, but I think the price of the disks (about £12 each) needs to fall quite substantially first.

Features: 9/10
Speed: 5/10
Ease of use: 8/10
Value: 10/10
OVERALL: 8/10