Remember when floppy drives ruled the land of backup storage? With hard drives becoming ever more cavernous and file sizes becoming more bloated each year, it's a wonder those atrociously slow floppy drives still come standard on every computer. Maybe it's time you moved up to something faster, better, and more capacious. A Zip 100, you say? Maybe last year. But why bother with that when you can get a Zip 250?

As you likely have gathered from the name, Iomega's Zip 250 uses 250 MB disks for incremental data backup. Since the media is removable, you can buy new disks when you need more storage instead of buying an entirely new drive. The 250 MB capacity is a much more reasonable standard for shuttling around files than the 1.44 MB diskettes used by a typical floppy drive.

You might be worried about purchasing a drive that uses a parallel interface, as that's the port most printers occupy. Iomega thoughtfully has designed the Zip 250 with a pass-through port, meaning you can attach the drive to the PC and then attach a printer to the Zip drive. It worked flawlessly in our tests. The drive comes with both an AC adapter and a parallel cable, along with one 250 MB Zip disk--everything you need to get started.

Zip drives always have been designed well, and the Zip 250 is exceptional in this regard. There's a well on the side for the power plug so it doesn't protrude from the jack. This makes it possible to stand the drive on its side if it's taking up too much space lying flat.

Zip products have been around long enough that the software for them has had plenty of time to mature. The included CD-ROMs contain useful tools like Copy Machine, which lets you copy a Zip disk using a single Zip drive, and a one-step backup/restore utility, which easily backs up files from your hard drive. We also liked the included Norton Zip Rescue Disaster Recovery software, which lets you make a working backup copy of your Windows installation so you can easily restore it if the system goes bad. It works much better than the Startup Disk utility included with Windows 95 and Windows 98.

The main drawback to the parallel-port Zip 250 is its abysmal transfer rate. Peaking at 0.8 MB per second, we're talking at least five minutes for a 250 MB transfer. That's under perfect circumstances, and we all know how often computer users encounter perfect circumstances. Regardless, it's better than the 1.44 MB floppy drive it replaces, and most users won't need to transfer more than a few megabytes worth of data at a time. --T. Byrl Baker

Pros:

• Backward compatible
• Smart design
• Excellent software
• Shares parallel port with printer

Cons:

• Slow transfer rates
• Compatible only with Windows PCs