PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Dealing with Orphaned Cartridge-Based Drives

Even the best-selling cartridge-based removable hard drives have always been at best a niche item. Some manufacturers have used the King Gillette model—giving away the razor and selling the blades—and so have sold their drives for less than what it costs to make them, expecting to make large profits by selling high-margin proprietary disks. Unfortunately, it often hasn’t worked out that way, as many manufacturers apparently greatly overestimated the number of cartridges that people would buy.

The predictable result has been bankrupt manufacturers and orphaned drives, such as the 230 MB EzFlyer, the 1 GB SparQ, and the 1.5 GB SyJet (all from SyQuest), and the 250 MB Avatar Shark. Although support, maintenance services, and media are still available for some orphaned drives, either from the original manufacturer or from a third party, these drives and disks are on their way out and it’s foolish to depend on them, let alone throw good money after bad. If you have an orphaned drive, we recommend taking the following steps:

• Transfer all data from the orphaned drive to hard disk, CD-RW, writable DVD, tape, or a similar standard technology while you can still do so. Neither your drive nor your disks will last forever. Your data is rotting as you read these words.

• If you have valuable data on disks you cannot read because your drive has failed, search the Web for data recovery services that can read the type of disk you use. There are many such ...