🚀 go-pugleaf

johna@magicnet.net (John Anderson) wrote:

>>I don't bad mouth the EZ, I just give all the reasons to buy
>>a Zip instead.  It's not hard to sell someone on the Zip, from what
>>I've seen.  The salesmen at Software etc. tried to sell me an EZ, but
>>I convinced them that the Zip was the better product. Trained
>>salesmen!  Everywhere I went over Christmas in Northern VA, I saw
>>plenty of EZs, and NO Parallel Zips.  Except the ONE reveal Zip at
>>Sears.  Speed tests are largely irrelevant, the home user market wants
>>simplicity, which means Parallel Port.  No SCSI, No IDE.  That's the
>>decisive factor.

>Actually the decisive factor is an individual decision.  Thats why it's
>important to state the pros and cons of each product objectively.  Since
>speed was the decisize factor for me, I think I would have been very
>unhappy if I was swayed to buy a ZIP drive by getting a one-sided
>impression.

See, I do this, I do readily admit to the EZ's speed advantage in some
areas.  Seek time, and transfer rate.  But, I also like to point out
that these two numbers are hardly the end-all-be-all of a storage
device.  For instance, while people argue over the millisecond
differences in seek times, hardly anyone mentions the spin-up/down
times, where the Zip is faster by several FULL seconds.

My main complaint about this onging debate is that so many people
overlook the non-performance related factors.  For example, Mr.
Anderson, you did not know about the above mentioned information until
now.  This is a valid reason to look harder at the Zip, regardless of
your need for speed.  Also, a good many vendors have licensed the
technology to make the Zip drive, the disks for it, or both.  To this
day, I only have heard of one vendor planning on making EZ carts, and
not a well known one at that.  This is another reason.  I do put forth
the pros and cons, but I also see that this issue is not just
performance, by any means.  It's also about the industry, and the
consumer market, which is increasingly populated by home users who may
or may not know the ins and outs of a modern PC.

-Primal Scream / Terraformer