Syquest EZ 135

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It's "EZ" With SyQuest!
by Mike Harvey

November 5, 1996

This is a review of my recently purchased SyQuest EZ-135 removable hard drive which recently had a price reduction from about $200 to about $120-$130 depending upon the distributor.

This small and extremely quiet drive is one which I choose to purchase to replace one of my previously purchased but destroyed 44 Meg SyQuest drives. The 44 meg drive was destroyed by a defective cartridge that I had purchased used from a Macintosh user.

Rather than spend the additional bucks to purchase a replacement drive, which at about $25.00 for just the drive mech isn't that bad. Putting that money toward the SyQuest EZ-135 drive was a much better choice I felt. The media cost is much less than that of the 44 meg cartridges and gets 3 times the storage space on a single cartridge.

While the EZ-135 drive has much competition from the IO-Mega ZIP drives, I prefer the much faster EZ-135 even if it does get discontinued latter this year. Cartridges will continue to be made as long as a demand for the remains in the market, just like they still make the 44 meg cartridges even though the drive itself has long since been replaced by newer, faster and high capacity ones.

 I got the EZ-135 SCSI drive, a SCSI cable, power supply, SCSI terminator Block, One 135 meg cartridge, a coupon for a second cartridge (the coupon for a second cartridge expires 31Jul96 but required being sent in with $5.00 S&H and the warranty card and proof of purchase) shipped for only $129.95 on my credit card.

While this may sound expensive to some, I've been using Atari computers since back in the days of the Atari 800XL and at that time, a single sided floppy drive cost substantially more than this drive and had about 1/100th of the storage capacity and much slower speed of course. The drive is small, and so extremely quiet, I can vouch for it and actually say it's quieter than any of my other hard drives in any of my Systems.

I purchased this drive as a good backup media and extra storage capacity for my PC clone, and which can also be used for the same thing easily on either the TT or Mega ST.

1. I have a Don Thomas Internet Special TT-030 machine, 245 meg drive
2. Mega4 ST I've owned for many years now with a 540 meg drive
3. 486DX4/100 machine currently equipped with just a Future Domain 8 bit SCSI card for SCSI drives and internal 420 meg IDE drive.

This drive works so easily on any of the above machines. I did have to purchase ICD Pro Utilities when I replaced the internal 50 meg drive on the TT anyhow, but it works great for the SyQuest also.

Data Transfer rate on the Atari's ran around 1500 @ 22 ms access. While advertised access time is at 13.5 MS, Rate HD rates it slower. But, believe me, it's plenty fast enough. If it wasn't for the vast amount of PD/Shareware that I've collected for the ST in addition to a number of years of on-line magazines like ST Report, Genie On-Line and others, I would even recommend this drive to a new Atari user as there single HD.

Simply make up a cartridge for your various needs and then you don't have to move from this partition to that partition, just swap out cartridges. i.e.: Place your clip art and DTP stuff (Pagestream or Calamus) on one cartridge.

Another for modem stuff, I still enjoy using the original Flash even though I've purchased many other packages over the years. The Original Flash with it's DO file capabilities and XYZ.TTP utility works great still on my Mega ST4. If you keep other programs like LDW Power and GDOS based prgs. Place them all on the same cartridge and then when it boots, you get GDOS or Speedo GDOS which ever you use.

Overall, for less than $200.00, I now have extra storage space which is usable on a number of different computers, and to add more, simply purchase another $19-22 cartridge, so it's cheap enough media. Safer than having a single large hard drive just in case your FAT tables get corrupted or you simply have a drive die. With a 540 meg drive, it's just too many 720 K floppies to really mess with. So, as you can see, a EZ-135 fits right in perfectly.

Keep on Using your Atari and remember it's only obsolete when it can no-longer work and meet your needs. I still enjoy my Atari Mega and all it can do it in ONLY 4 Megs and the TT I just got this spring for it's speed at doing things.