De USB poort waarvan iedere pc nu al zo'n twee jaar vergezeld gaat lijkt eindelijk enig nut te krijgen. Na webcams, muisen en joysticks komt IOmega nu met een USB versie van z'n Zip drive. Een handig alternatief voor parallel (elke moderne PC heeft USB, dus je kunt 'm overal aan hangen, wat bij SCSI niet lukt), alleen nu nog hopen dat de snelheid ook beter is, want die is bij parallel dikke drek:
Performance was good. In real-world benchmark testing, the USB Zip drive was anywhere from 2.4 times to 5.4 times faster than the parallel Zip. The internal ATAPI Zip drive was slightly quicker, but note that it uses the much faster IDE interface (5 to 33 Mbyte/Sec) while USB is only capable of 1.2 Mbyte/Sec. The USB Zip drive also performed much better than the parallel Zip drive in Ziff-Davis' Business Disk WinMark 99, garnering a score of 381 Kbyte/Sec. The ATAPI drive was 20% faster in this benchmark. What's interesting, however, is that the CPU utilization for the USB Zip drive during the test was a mere 7%, soundly besting the other drives. This means that when you copy files to or from the USB Zip drive, your computer will still be free to perform other operations such as printing.
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