MORE CONVENIENT AND COMPATIBLE THAN THE ALTERNATIVES.

I've become dependent upon zip disk technology through years of using the older models but found the parallel models tedious to use because of competition for the only printer port, incompatibility with most printer switches and scanner ports, the touchiness of the software and slow performance.

This USB model is an amazing upgrade because of its ease of use with Windows XP and the USB ports. I cite particularly the built in support in XP; no need to deal with the bloated IOMEGA software. XP will recognize its availability or removal quickly, and can format it as well, leaving no real need for IomegaWare. I love the fact that it's powered by the USB port, obviating the need for an adapter and extra wire. The power requirement is 498mA and the standard USB port delivers 500mA.

Compared to backing up files on CD-R there's more instant gratification and less media handling to just copy files to the Zip drive, just as I would a hard drive. I develop web sites and want the security of having immediate copies of changed files on a removable medium and this fills the bill quite adequately. In my view it beats recording on multi-session CD-R's, waiting for the CD to finalize, and ... in all, it will actually be a faster process.

Why the 250MB model? I wanted compatibility with the old 100MB media, and there are plenty of those out there. Otherwise I would have purchased the 750MB Zip for its USB 2.0 capability, but it can only read, not write, 100MB media. I primarily use 250MB media for my own purposes and I've noticed that it seems much faster on this drive than does the 100MB media. I don't know why yet.

Capacity? All of my web sites and important data folders are much less than 250 MB so that's not an issue for me. On a daily basis I backup only my active web sites, email files, and spreadsheet data. For more voluminous data I use the nicely designed "Backup My PC" program from Stomp Software. This used to be the Seagate Backup Exec supplied with Windows 98 as "MS Backup". With compression the 250MB media can hold up to 400+ MB, nearing the capacity of a CDROM disc.

Performance? I can live with USB1.1 technology though I surely would have preferred 2.0 since my hardware supports it. Initially the Zip drive ran very slowly and I was quite unhappy with that. Turns out that Windows XP has a setting in Device Manager under the Policies tab to "Optimize for performance". That was not being defaulted to. My performance increased 5 to 7-fold with this setting. Also, I was having intermittent media errors which disappeared when I unchecked "Enable write caching on the disk", again under "Policies".

In summary, I consider this USB Zip to be very convenient owing to its strong support from XP, freedom from confining power adapters, and hot plugability (on or off) to the USB port. I also like the Iomega Brand. Most important it offers me compatibility with most other computers I interface with and with acceptable capacity and speed. If you do buy this drive, consider favoring the 250MB media for yourself (performance, as well as capacity) and the 100MB for compatibility with others (if this applies to you).

Hope this information proves useful and that you find the 250MB Zip to be worth your $$$.