SyQuest SyJet SyJet drive 1.5 GB

Author's product rating:   

Reliability	Good
Ease of Installation	Excellent - very quick and easy
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Now cheap, reasonable data volumes, easy to use
Disadvantages:	new media hard to obtain, old technology

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Wouldn't it be great if you could have a medium as easy to use as a floppy disk, that was almost as quick as a hard drive, held a halfway decent amount of data, and was reusable?

Guess what - it's already been invented, and by all accounts has already been thrown upon the scrap heap of 'great ideas that never quite made it big time'

I speak of the Syquest SyJet 1.5Gb removable disk drive.

Nowadays, in a world obsessed by CD and DVD technology, it's easy to mock parallel port devices that present a 'virtual SCSI' interface to your PC or Mac, and use moderately expensive and highly obscure media - but these are still useful bits of kit to have around.

Mention 'removable storage' and two names immediately spring to mind; Iomega with their ZIP drive and SyQuest.

The SyJet 1.5Gb offers a quality product which provides all the functionality described in the opening paragraph.

The full kit comprises of a SCSI external disk drive, in a plastic enclosure which can stand vertically or horizontally on your desktop, a 'power brick' and a parallel to SCSI interface cable, and driver software.

The removable disks consist of two circular platters mounted in a rigid plastic casing, around 1cm thick and just about the same size as a 3.5" floppy disk.

The nominal capacity of this media is stated as 1.5Gb, which by my reckoning is around a thousand floppy disks, or putting it another way enough for (according to the media box);

1500 pictures at 450x750 pixels

2 hours of CD quality stereo audio

50 minutes of MPEG video

The capacity of 2xCD-ROMs

And claims a cost of 8 cents a megabyte.

I've no idea how many MP3 tracks can be put on 1.5Gb, but the playing time is probably measured in days!

It's true that this sort of technology is now considered *very* unfashionable, however I consider this judgement to be a little harsh.

The unit is ideally suited for either providing a cost effective backup medium for recovering your desktop PC or notebook, or providing a means of transferring bulk data between systems.

When new, the SyJet 1.5Gb drive probably cost a couple of hundred pounds, you can now get a good second hand unit for a little over a tenner a throw on Ebay, media isn't especially common, but shouldn't cost you much more than £2.50 a disk.

Setting up your system is simplicity itself; connect the power supply up to the mains (it uses a standard 'kettle' plug) the other end terminates in a distinctly non-standard 5 pin DIN connector, attach the signal cable at one end to your printer socket, the other goes into a 50 pin SCSI socket - pop in a removable disk drive, and run a single program called 'visit95' - actually this works fine for windows/95, 98 and ME.

Checking your 'my computer' you'll see a new icon declaring 'removable storage'.

The driver package also boasted OS/2 support, Windows 3.x, and Windows/NT. For all I know, it would also support MacOS and Linux, but don't take my word for that, anyhow, chances are the disk formatting would be different.

The particular unit I got my hands on was a 'toss out' from a friend, I didn't have any drivers, but found them on driverguide.com - in a few minutes, I was up and running.

Unlike a CD where you require special 'authoring' software, the SyJet works just like any other 'proper' hard drive - transfer speeds are broadly similar to that of a hard drive, and in use, it was quite capable of delivering streamed video in AVI format.

I suspect if you were to insist on trying to use a lot of other parallel interface devices such as printers, scanners etc, the performance would become unacceptable, but as a standalone device, it proved perfectly adequate.

I have a slight concern that in long term use, the removable disk units may be prone to errors if exposed to dust and/or magnetic fields, but certainly on my test setup I didn't experience any problems.

In theory, you should be able to attach a number of these devices to an individual PC, the SCSI address is selectable by means of a small switch on the rear of the unit, exactly why you may wish to do this escapes me for the moment!

What may prove an interesting challenge is to see if it's possible to use the SCSI interface with other devices, such as conventional hard drives, tape streamers etc - I'll update this opinion if I ever get around to trying this!

In short, a highly effective, and now inexpensive means of providing bulk removable storage to Wintel systems

Makes you wonder why it never really took of in the first place!