Syquest was a maker of removable hard drives. It was a clever idea that is completely obsolete in these days of high capacity USB flash drives, but at the time, Syquest drives solved a real problem. Founded January 27, 1982, they were a pioneer of removable hard drives for personal computers.
The appeal of Syquest drives
I thought Syquest drives were great because instead of buying a conventional hard drive, you could buy a Syquest drive instead, and if you ran out of capacity, you could just buy another cartridge and swap the cartridges as if they were large floppy disks. They fit in a half-height 5.25-inch bay and used the same MFM or SCSI interfaces as conventional hard drives. Initially available in a 5-megabyte capacity upon their introduction in 1983, they grew to 44 and 88 megabytes later in the decade.
You didn’t necessarily save money by going the Syquest route. In the November 1990 issue of Byte, I found an ad for hard drives. A 40 MB Syquest drive cost $525, while the cartridges cost $85. Meanwhile, a conventional 200 megabyte hard drive cost $875. So if you bought a Syquest drive and five disks, you paid $950 for an equivalent amount of capacity.
A 330 megabyte drive cost $1,450. At that capacity, Syquest was more cost-effective, since you could get 9 disks plus the drive for $1,290 and come out slightly ahead for capacity too. So that was a bargain, if you only needed to use 40 megabytes of data at a time.
It was also a little bit slower than a conventional hard drive, and by the time you actually needed more capacity, the cost of hard drives had usually decreased.
So I don’t think very many people bought these drives to use as primary storage. It was one of those things that seemed like a good idea, but didn’t hold up after you investigated it further.
Use as a secondary mass storage drive
People who bought them usually used them as a secondary mass storage device. They were especially popular with graphic designers, who would store their large files on removable discs that they could send to a service bureau for printing. They just kept several discs, enough to cover each project they were working on, and they would rotate the discs as new projects came in and old projects got printed.
In the days when 44 or 88 MB was a healthy amount of storage, Syquest dominated this market. The problem for Syquest was when capacities reached 100 MB.
The looming threat of the Zip disk
In March 1995, Iomega released its 100 MB Zip disk and drive. The Zip drive used a flexible disk for removable storage rather than a hard disk platter. So it was a bit slower, but it was also cheaper. The drive cost $199 and a Zip disk storing 100 MB only cost $20. And it connected to the parallel port, intended for printers. It was slower, but saved you the expensive of a SCSI host adapter.
Syquest answered with a 135 MB drive that used removable cartridges. It had more capacity and it was faster, but it wasn’t as cost effective as the Zip drive. If you really needed better speed or slightly higher capacity, the Syquest drive wasn’t a bad choice. But the Zip drive was so popular, Iomega ran out of manufacturing capacity and had to license the technology to other companies like Epson just to keep up with demand.
But that wasn’t the only problem. Iomega made removable hard drives too. They generally hadn’t been as popular as Syquest drives. But the popularity of the Zip drive gave Iomega a tremendous amount of name recognition. So when Iomega released its 1 GB Jaz drive, it enjoyed Iomega’s name recognition. Syquest produced drives of similar capacity called the Syjet and Sparq, but they couldn’t keep up with Iomega’s momentum. The decreasing cost and increasing popularity of recordable CDs only increased the pressure.
Syquest was never able to turn the tide, and as a result went into bankruptcy November 17, 1998. Iomega bought parts of the company in January 1999. Part of the agreement was the rest of the company could stay in business selling existing inventory under the name SYQT. This continued until 2003, when the inventory ran out.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
my Iomega always broke down both drives and the floppy
My linked blog post on the Iomega Zip drive isn’t exactly flattering. But it seems like the people who had few problems with them say I’m too harsh, and the people who had problems say I’m not harsh enough. I guess that means I probably got the balance close to where it should be.
The Zip drives could be problematic indeed, but there seemed to be good and bad runs of them and overall I think they were not so bad. They sold zillions of them so there’s going to be some failures but most people used them without incident. I still have a few zip 100 drives that I use to this day to transfer data to and between vintage machines and they’ve worked without a hitch. The scsi and usb versions are much less hassle than the parallel variant but I remember back in the day scsi was spendy.
What a flashback! I used to have a SyQuest EZ125.
On the Mac you already had a SCSI port, so it was kind of a no-brainer. The later introduced ZIP drive soon became infamous for really bad data loss. Luckily I never used one personally, only in the office (where I also lost quite some data thanks to ZIP drives). So I kept my EZDrive on my PowerMac 7600 for quite a while until I bought my first PowerBook years later. I loved those drives and cartridges and they never failed on me.