NOTE:
After reviewing this SyQuest product with some apprehension, we started getting email from people reporting big problems with the drive. Then our own evaluation unit broke. Now it appears that SyQuest has gone belly up. Not surprising, given all of the horror stories we've heard over the years (and experienced firsthand) with their products. For those who bought a SparQ because of our recommendation, we apologize. We should have gone with our instincts and spent more time trying to break the thing before writing up the review. We wouldn't have had to wait very long.

[Here's the original review (which initially carried a 3.5 battery rating]

After several years of Iomega kickin' the butts of other companies in the personal removable drive market, competitor SyQuest has finally released its attempt at a Zip killer: The SparQ 1.0 Gigabyte cartridge drive.

I have to admit, I had a bad feeling about SyQuest as I ordered my SparQ. I was the frustrated owner of a SyQuest 44MB drive. Actually I still am the owner of this drive, but it now sits on a shelf, gathering dust and no longer making my life miserable. It was plagued with problems from the day I installed it. I was one happy techno-camper the day my Mac Zip drive finally arrived (after a one month back order). My Zip experience has been flawless. In two years of almost daily use, I've never had a problem with the drive or a single disk failure.

So I approached the SparQ with some trepidation.

The SparQ installation experience is very similar to installing an Iomega drive. A set-up poster shows all of the steps in easy-to-decipher graphics and text. The SparQ comes in two flavors: a parallel port external and an EIDE internal. I got the external type. The external model is a bit taller than a Zip, has an oval window on the top, and is colored an inky black. Other than that, it looks pretty similar to its Iomega predecessor. To install, you simply connect the parallel cable to your printer port, plug your printer into the pass-through port on the back of the SparQ, plug in the SparQ's external power supply, turn on the unit and your PC, insert the Starter Disk, insert the installation floppy and install the SparQ software via the Add/Remove Control Panel. The install program detects what system it's connected to and assigns the appropriate driver. Voila, you now have a bottomless 1 gig removable hard drive.

At least, my experience was this smooth and painless. I was disturbed to find a discussion on ZDNet's chat boards filled with horror stories about the drive. One guy claims he went through 4 units before he got one that worked. Another person couldn't work his CD-ROM and the SparQ at the same time, yet another had multiple disk failures. All this and unresponsive tech support. The thing that kept me from freaking out from all this bad news was remembering that I've read the same thing about the Zip and Iomega. I guess every piece of hardware is bound to produce some lemons and those who're forced to pucker up and drink are going to complain about it online. I know I have!

The thing that's especially great about the SparQ is the relative low cost. The unit can be had on the street for as low as US$180 bucks and the *1GB* cartridges are only $33 each (in packs of three). A gig's worth of Zip carts would cost you $130!

There are several drawbacks and cautions, however. First off, calling it a 1 gig drive is a bit misleading. The disk can only really hold 956MB and 7.53 of that is already taken up by system overhead. Weirdly enough, boot magazine claimed they tried to copy a full gig of data onto the SparQ and only managed to fit 690 megs. But then, boot also claimed that the starter cart (that comes with the drive) was filled with 728MB of "required installation software and utilities," when, actually, there's only about 30MB of these apps. The rest of the disk is filled with bonus software including SerifDrawPlus 3.0 (a full-blown graphics program), WebVCR (for downloading websites), McAfee WebScan which you can delete if you like.

The other questionable thing about the SparQ is the access time. SyQuest claims that the parallel version has an average access time of 12 msec. If they got these speeds, they were obviously testing it on a high-end machine under ideal conditions. On my...ah...top-of-the-line 486, access and read speeds are very slow. bootLabs claims they got 22.9 msec on a 266 MHz Pentium II. Given these speeds, it's probably not a good idea to get the SparQ if you want to run applications off of it. I also don't know why they didn't make a SCSI version (and as far as I know, they have no plans to). They'd get much better speeds via SCSI and would appeal to a larger market. There's also no plans (again, as far as I know) for a Mac version.

But even with these negatives, I'd still recommend a SparQ if you're looking for a cheap, high-capacity storage device. But then there's that nagging question about SyQuest's reliability. I just got off the phone with a friend who says he's heard stories about the SyJet (SyQuest's 1.5GB drive that sells for $300) crapping out a lot. So, I guess I should recommend the SparQ with a word of caution: Your mileage my vary. For me, I've got a bitchin' new back-up drive.

- Gareth Branwyn [4/22/98]