Mobile-storage device maker Iomega has been a miracle of reinvention. When the company launched its Zip and Jaz drives in the mid-1990s, they were the most aggressively successful of a score of proprietary storage formats.
But like any proprietary standard, you need to dominate your market if you are to survive. And that dream was never really on the cards for Iomega. As the price of recordable CDs plunged, so too did interest in Iomega's drives.
But by moving to the mainstream, the company has managed to pull itself out of the pit of doom that swallowed up most of its competitors. The Iomega portfolio now includes portable hard drives, pocket USB drives, software, data recovery services and even network attached storage. And ever optimistic, they still make Zip drives.
And of course, there's the Predator. The previous Predator was what Iomega claimed to be the fastest external drive on the market, and the latest one is no slouch, offering 40-speed read and write, and 24-speed rewrite - double the rewrite speed of the previous model. In theory, this should let you rip a 60-minute CD in just three minutes.
However, the Predator is no longer the fastest drive on the block. That honour goes to rival QPS, whose Que! CDRW 2i manages to s0pin, rip and burn at 52x24x52.
To reach those speeds, however, your computer will need a USB2.0 connection.