Cheapest mp3 player portable

Moore’s Law applies to disk drives, too. Every 18 months, the capacity seems to double. So do the choices. Here’s a handicapper’s guide to today’s storage options.

Zip and Co. The Iomega Zip Drive remains a best-seller, thanks to the original 100MB version more than the Zip 250. But the Zip is being edged aside by CD-R and CD-RW. The Iomega Jaz, the 2GB removable-drive cartridge, isn’t cost-effective, at $125 per disk, and it’s fading fast. By the time the Iomega PocketZip (née Clik!) staggered to market, a tiny 40MB, $10 disk didn’t seem so exciting. Thus, it’s been repositioned as portable music player storage.

The Iomega Peerless, an upcoming self-contained hard drive ($250 for a USB-based starter kit, and $130, $160, and $200 for a 5GB, 10GB, and 20GB module, respectively), could do well if Iomega generates enough market share to create an unofficial standard à la Zip.

High-Capacity Drives. The idea of a high-capacity drive that also reads standard floppy disks was good. But the Zip’s dominance killed the 120MB Imation SuperDisk (LS-120), and the 200MB Sony HiFD never got off the ground.

Flash Memory. Flash memory is for your digital camera, MP3 player, or file transfers from notebooks. All of the cards fit into notebooks with PC Card adapters (from no cost to $50) or into PCs with USB adapters ($25 to $50). If you need to choose between CompactFlash (CF) and SmartMedia, both the size of squared-off poker chips, you’ll do better with the thicker CF, because more devices use it, and CF has twice the capacity of SmartMedia, with 128MB and 256MB commonly available.

As devices get smaller, the stamp-size MultiMediaCard (MMC) and its Secure Digital (SD) superset with rights management will gain popularity; they could knock off CF and SmartMedia. Sony claims 100-plus signatories to its Memory Stick standard, but it’s mostly Sony producing the devices. For photos or music, you’ll want 64MB minimum. Figure $2 per megabyte.

PC Card Hard Drives. If you want to transfer or back up data off your notebook, look to the IBM Microdrive, at 340MB or 1GB (about $300 and $500 street, respectively). Or consider the 1GB Hitachi PC Card hard drive, or the 2GB Toshiba model (each about $500). The Microdrive is actually a CompactFlash PC Card hard drive, and if you can live with the high battery drain, you can use it in many digital cameras.

If you want to back up your entire notebook, consider an external hard drive that connects via the PC Card slot. Such drives are available from a number of makers, including CMS, in 6GB to 30GB models. Last year, I was keen on the external 10GB IBM Travelstar 10E; now it seems a bit bulky.

DataPlay. Think of the DataPlay as an inch-wide CD-R. This write-once medium will cost $10 and hold 500MB (250MB per side). It’s great for digital photography and portable music players, and the serialized disks have the music industry smiling (cheap to make, hard to crack). This is the great leap forward that the PocketZip wasn’t. But it’s months late.

CD/DVD Drives. While I’m a big fan of DVDs, there are precious few data DVDs out there, so CD-RW is the way to go on desktops. There is no assured standard for rewritable DVDs yet, but when it arrives—maybe by year’s end—you’ll likely be able to burn audio and data CDs and DVD videos that you can play on your home DVD player. You won’t, however, be able to pirate a DVD, and even if you could, at $10 per blank disk, why would you want to?

My Recommendations. When you’re buying a desktop PC, spec it with both DVD and CD-RW drives. If you can get only one, go with CD-RW, for an increase of about $100 over a vanilla CD drive. Use it mostly for write-once CD recording. If you’re into digital photography, look for printers with CF and SmartMedia readers built-in; get a PC Card reader built into a new desktop, or add an external USB CF or PC Card reader to your current PC.

On notebooks, you’ll pay a stiff $200 to $300 upcharge for CD-RW, so consider backing up to the office server, your home PC, or an online backup service. With flash memory, buy 64MB or higher-capacity modules. The Zip is the cheapest way to back up medium-size chunks of data on existing desktops or notebooks; get the USB version. For the future, the DataPlay shows great promise.

Copyright ?? 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.