The Best Piece of Obsolete Hardware I Ever Owned...
Written: Apr 28 '00 (Updated Oct 04 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, Cheap, Reliable, Easy-to-Use
Cons: Some additional legwork required for setup
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| Pyanfar's Full Review: SYQT SyQuest SparQ (SPARQ1AI-01) Drive |
When I bought this device, I faced a crisis: my only computer was my ThinkPad 365XD, and it only had a mere 810MB HD. The factory-installed crapola took up all but 260MB of that. After realizing I had been wasting time adding/removing stuff and tracking down excess clutter, I knew it was time to move up. But a laptop isn't really geared for another hard drive, is it?
I needed portability with no strings attached.
So, off I went to buy a Jaz drive from Iomega. Oddly enough, my mind was changed when I saw this little device sitting next to the Jaz drives: it was $100 cheaper, each cartridge averaged $5-10 less, and there was a special on a 3-pack. SyQuest was a reliable company. What a deal!
The SparQ 1.0GB is a portable removable storage drive that is ideal for just about anything you want to throw at it. I used it at first to install the applications I needed but couldn't possibly fit on my only hard drive.
Then I discovered that its access time makes it ideal for games! I played Quake II with a full install and had no problems at all; if anything, the processor got bogged down if the two drives (C and "E") got too far out of sync. I also enjoyed a slew of other games, including Starcraft and Tomb Raider II.
The SparQ 1.0 unit is light, compact, and quiet. When you first fire it up (insert a cartridge and it revs up to speed), it sounds amusing, like a small siren is inside the drive. Then it settles down to a very muted whirr. Each cartridge holds one Gigabyte, and the drive appears as a drive letter in the Windows Explorer, so reading and writing to/from it is no different than anything else. Ejecting the cartridge is automatically controlled, like a CD-ROM drive, so no shoving a button so hard it knocks the unit across the table. The amazing part about the SparQ drive is that it runs from the parallel port, the slowest connection on any computer, yet its proprietary hardware acceleration allows it to process data as fast as any FAT16 hard drive.
Installation of the unit is pretty straightforward; you have to do the steps in order because you don't want Plug & Play to interfere, but both installation and upgrade of the software is quick and runs without a hitch. You install the software from a floppy, shut down, hook up the drive, and power up with the Install cartridge in. From there, the cartridge completes the setup process and you're ready to go in about 5 minutes' total time.
The only problem is that mere months after I bought this lovely device, SyQuest shocked everybody by going under. Their website still offers drivers and support information, but sadly, no one bought SyQuest up, so their products are adrift, a casualty of Moore's Law. The saddest part is that the software for Windows 95 was written to detect Windows 95, so running it under 98 gets you a message that says, "This software was written for Windows 95 only." I'm sure this is an oversight, since it wouldn't really make a difference, but there's no way to correct it, and thus I am no longer able to use it at all :-(
UPDATE: Just out of sheer desperation I went out to the SyQuest site to see if anything new had been listed; even though the company is defunct, they've been pretty nice about keeping their site up ( http://www.syquest.com ). If you own a SparQ drive, follow this link:
http://www.syquest.com/support/ftp.html
You can download a single-disk install utility that will support the drive in Windows 98. It's called the "Shuttle" utility, and it works quite nicely. Thanks to that, I'm back up to speed...now if it only works in ME! ;)
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
Pyanfar
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Location: Frankfort, KY
Reviews written: 168
Trusted by: 78 members
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