But they're a solid alternative for backups and for warehousing files that aren't used every day. However, they're now twice as expensive as standard one-gigabyte drives. They also work at speeds a bit slower than today's newest hard drives but a bit faster than many older hard drives. The SyJet 1.3GB stores 1.3 gigabytes on a cartridge, while the Iomega Jaz stores 1 gigabyte on a cartridge. Both come in Macintosh and IBM-compatible versions that require SCSI controllers, and SyQuest has announced it will release a kit that connects its drive to a PC's parallel port.
Users can choose between internal and external models and have a choice of cartridge sizes.
The SyJet and Jaz both present the same incompatibility problems as their smaller cousins, the EZ135, the EZFlyer and the Zip. They're neither compatible with each other nor with any other drive, including SyQuest's popular magneto-optical line. Today, tape drives have been relegated to backup status, and they provide a quick, easy and inexpensive way to protect yourself from losing everything to a hard disk crash . The rise in hard-drive capacity briefly outstripped the ability of tape drives to back up a disk with a single tape cartridge, but a new generation of backup units has solved the problem at a reasonable cost. These units come in a variety of shapes and capacities, ranging from 800 megabytes to 3.2 gigabytes.