I have to admit, due to a bad experience with a 270 MB Syquest drive and a PC many years ago, I have never been big SCSI fan. I also found the Syquest disk to be temperamental and ended up giving it away.

So I think Iomega must have had me in mind when they came up with their SCSI to USB adapter.

I installed the software, plugged the USB adapter into the connector on the back of the Jaz drive, stuck it into a free USB port and it worked.

Windows recognised it, and assigned it a drive letter that showed up in Windows Explorer.

Then is was only a 40 minute wait for the drive to format before I could start using it.

The one hiccup was when I tried to print something - the computer lost the printer. I am not sure why this happened. The Iomega software should not have caused any conflicts with ordinary printer ports.

The trouble-shooting guide was not much help. I took a chance and called Iomega online support. The chap I spoke to was very pleasant, although he was only repeating what I had already read in the trouble-shooting guide. He did suggest I check the System Properties. Some unnecessary Iomega SCSI devices had been installed. After removing them and rebooting, everything worked.

I also tested the Iomega Jaz drive on a Pentium II with 64 MB of RAM running Windows 95. Again the software was quick and easy to install without the need to open up the computer or fiddle around slotting in SCSI cards. Windows 95 does not fully support USB. Once the Iomega software is installed only Iomega devices will be supported on any USB connection.

Using other USB devices means upgrading to Windows 98.

Still the Jaz drive hummed away quietly taking about 20 minutes to copy 780 MB of assorted files.

USB is certainly not as fast as SCSI. Depending on your computer and operating system a sustained transfer rate of up to 900KB per second can be achieved with the USB adapter. A transfer rate of 8.0 MB per second is claimed for SCSI.

If you are planning on using your Jaz drive as another hard drive, you would be better off with SCSI. Any compatible SCSI adaptor should work, although Iomega recommend the Jaz Ultra SCSI for best performance.

A SCSI cable is included in the package.

You cannot connect any other SCSI device to the Jaz drive when you are using the USB adapter.

The Jaz drive is probably not a very cost effective storage solution, especially when you consider the cost of the 2 GB disk (RRP AU$233) --- which is not included.

The 2GB drive is compatible with 1GB Jaz disks. It does give you the option of transferring a lot more data than a standard CD, while the USB adapter makes it easier to move the drive to another computer.

Included with the package is QuickSync, a simple backup program that will create backups of the files on your hard drive.

The Jaz USB adapter and 2GB Jaz drive should work with any USB-enabled PC or Mac computer. All you need is Windows 95/98/2000, Windows NT 4.0 or Mac OS 8.1 to 9.1.