Page 2      Diablo Blue      March, 2000

The king is dead! Long live the king! (Until a successor ascends the throne.) The "dead king" in this case is the traditional 3.5-inch floppy disk drive and its cousins: Zip drives, Super Drives, tape backups and other removable storage media.
The new king is the CD-RW (Compact Disk-Re-Writeable) drive. The successor, already waiting in the wings, is the DVD-RW (Digital  Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disk, depending on your orientation). Portable USB hard drives may be pretenders to the throne.
Of course I'm exaggerating a bit. You can't count out the lowly 1.44-megabyte floppy drive just yet. It is adequate for typical word processing and other applications that don't produce big files. Prices are low enough for both drives and diskettes to keep them alive for the near term. Shipments should peak in 2001, then start a slow decline.
Iomga's Zip and Jaz products, Super floppies, tape drives and their kin won't disappear overnight either, but they all have drawbacks that will make it hard for them to compete with CD-RW drives in the long term. Generally, they have more limited capacity, higher media costs, and aren't priced all that much lower than the CD products. (Note that Iomega recognizes the inevitable and introduced its own CD-RW drive, the ZipCD, in June 1999.) For example, a 100MB Zip drive costs about $100 to $130, depending on type (internal, external, SCSI, parallel, USB). Disk prices range from about $8 to $15 as this is written in mid-January, 2000. A 1GB Jaz drive costs about $200, with disks going for $90 to $100.
By comparison, CD-RW drives hold 650MB and sell for anywhere from $170 to about $400, with most in the $200-250 range. That means their disks hold as much as 6.5 Zip 100 disks and roughly 66% as much as the 1-gig Jaz disk. The kicker is the cost of media.
CD-R disks cost just $1 to $2 each. You can only write files to them once, no rewriting, but you can write to them in increments; adding files until the disk is full. This makes them ideal for permanent backup or archiving files. They are easily portable, since they are compatible with all CD-ROM drives of recent years. And they're so cheap you can use a lot of them without busting the budget.
CD-RW disks cost more, about $5 to $6, but you can write and rewrite to them just as you would a floppy or Zip drive. Generally there are more compatibility issues than with CD-R disks; they may not be readable in any CD-ROM, or even other CD-RW, drives. They are best used for day-to-day backup.
The nice thing is that a CD-RW drive gives you the best of both worlds, since you can burn CD-R disks or use CD-RW disks in one. 
Let me tell you about my experiences with two quite different types of CD-RW drives I've been using for four months, since Sept. 1999. One is a Verbatim brand, Model 4420a (4X Record, 4X Rewrite, 20X Read): the drive itself is made by Mitsubishi The other is more exotic: a Compro external drive from ACS Innovations. Made specifically for use with notebook computers, it weighs just over a pound and connects to a notebook PCMCIA slot or USB port.
Necessity led me to the CD-RW drives. I was preparing to do my Media Workshop in Orlando, FL last fall and realized the PowerPoint slide show I use to support my presentation was far too big to fit on a floppy. Putting it on a CD-ROM disk was the logical way to go. I began by investigating CD-R (record only) drives. They were cheap ($160 or.less) but I learned this was because they were being phased out. I was advised to go for a CD-RW drive instead -- and settled on the Verbatim 4420a as one of the fastest in my price range.
Installing it was simplicity itself. I merely disconnected my existing CD-ROM drive and plugged in the new drive in its place, using the existing cable. It came with just!burn software from CeQuadrat (taken over by Adaptec in mid-1999), which I found very easy to use after an initial goof. I ruined several disks by trying to format them not realizing that they were preformatted by Verbatim!
The just!burn Wizard makes it easy to create backup, audio or data disks. The CD-ROM disks I've burned with

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