Product Reviews

Well, it's about time. It's been almost two years since Steve Jobs stood up at a Macworld Expo to announce that 'SCSI is dead' and that the Mac range would be adopting USB and FireWire.

That left owners of the SCSI-based Jaz drives with a problem if they ever wanted to upgrade their machines. If they decided to upgrade to a G3 or G4 Power Mac, they at least had the option of buying a SCSI interface card, but iMac owners couldn't even do that - which is why my Jaz drive has been gathering dust on a shelf for the past 18 months.

But Iomega has finally

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produced a USB-to-SCSI adaptor for the Jaz drive range. Iomega isn't the first company to produce such an adaptor, but the other adaptors available on the market have tended to be a bit temperamental and only compatible with a limited range of SCSI devices. Some of them only seemed to work with HP scanners, and occasionally they simply dropped dead if you brought a Jaz or Zip drive anywhere near them.

So this, at least, has the benefit of being the 'official' Iomega adaptor, even if it is identical to the one Fujitu uses with its own DynaMO drives. We tested the adaptor on both 1Gb and 2Gb Jaz drives and experienced no problems at all. However, it's not compatible with Zip drives that use a SCSI interface, so owners of SCSI Zips are probably better off just buying a new USB model.

The USB interface restricts the maximum speed of data transfer to around 800K/sec, but that's down to the limits of USB and can't be blamed on Iomega. On the other hand, it does raise the question of why Iomega still hasn't produced a FireWire adaptor, or even a Jaz drive that actually has FireWire built into it. Earth to Iomega, Earth to Iomega...