A successor drive, known as the SyQuest EZFlyer, was released in 1996. It was backwards compatible with the EZ 135 disks, and could utilize a higher capacity 230 MB disk.[3]
Specifications
Capacity: 135 MB
Average seek time: 13.5 ms
Burst transfer rate: 4 MB/s
Buffer size: 64K
Mechanism rated for 200,000 hours
Interfaces
The EZ 135 drive was available with several interfaces. The external drive was available with parallel or SCSI interfaces; the internal drive was available with IDE or SCSI interfaces.
Pricing
At introduction, the EZ 135 Drive had the following prices (in US dollars):
135 MB cartridge: $20.00
EZ 135 Drive – external SCSI: $240.00
EZ 135 Drive – internal IDE: $200.00
Sales
The EZ 135 Drive was designed to be a competitor to the IomegaZip drive and LS-120 SuperFloppy. The original box listed several advantages:
Much faster
Higher capacity
2-year warranty
Additionally the removable hard disk cartridges included a 5-year warranty.
Unfortunately, the EZ 135 drive was not backwards compatible with other SyQuest drives, and the original capacity was never increased beyond 135 MB. The Zip drive became popular and SyQuest's sales declined.