Last Thursday we reported that the struggling Iomega Corporation was putting the finishing touches on a pair of new Zip drives. Rumored to be made available in both USB and PCMCIA versions, these 250MB, backwards-compatible drives will be based on a notebook mechanism, sources said.
As a result of this architecture, the drives can be developed in a more compact fashion. AppleInsider sources who had come in contact with earlier prototypes of the new drives, claim that they are about half the height of the current external Zip drives and are extremely lightweight.
Prototypes were spotted in smooth-surfaced, dark blue casings, though production units are expected to sport the normal computer-plastic texture that results from acid-burning. The casings were described to be very curvy, and still contain a window on top to view the disk inside.
Since the drives are cross-platform, there is a disk eject button on the front of the units, sources said. Disks don't eject with a spring mechanism as current external Zips do, but with the notebook mechanism's motorized push.
According to sources, the rear of the drive contains three ports: a USB port, a small socket where the user may plug in a dongle-type attachment with a PC Card on the end, and an external power adapter port. Apparently a number of engineers were disappointed that they had to ship the drives with an ac adapter, since USB can supply the power on its own.
The drives push the limits of USB power (500 mA) and testing has shown that not all USB interfaces can reliably put out that much power. The inclusion of an ac adapter is out of concern for product reliability and data integrity, sources said. Sometime in the future the company hopes to reduce power consumption so that no adapter would be required.
The drives are expected to be announced at this week's Seybold Seminars conference, and should be available to consumers sometime in September.