Skip to content
Thoughtful, detailed coverage of everything Apple for 33 years
and the TidBITS Content Network for Apple professionals
Show full articles

TidBITS#51/Drive_2.4

Adam Engst No comments

Drive 2.4 Details

Rapport / Drive 2.4 Kennect Technology 120A Albright Way Los Gatos, CA 95030 800/552-1232 408/370-2866 KENNECT on America Online Rating: 9 Penguins out of a possible 10 Summary: -- The combination of Rapport and the Drive 2.4 provides read/write compatibility with most 3.5" disk formats as well as several special formats, such as 2.4 MB Mac HFS disks

Adam Engst No comments

Floppy Woes

There may be a silver lining in every cloud (and there's certainly one in my hard disk, thanks to La Cie), but I still dislike one of the consequences of upgrading my venerable double-drive SE to an SE/30

Adam Engst No comments

Installation

The Drive 2.4 and Rapport both came in large boxes with plenty of foam padding and electrostatic protection bags. I was a bit surprised to receive such a large box containing the two of them, but the volleyball games at the shipping warehouse would be hard put to damage either piece

Adam Engst No comments

Design

Kennect put a good deal of thought into the design of Rapport and the Drive 2.4, with only two small problems that I'll get to soon. Rapport is a small unit that looks like a slightly oversized cable plug

Adam Engst No comments

Basic Operation

Despite the fact that the Drive 2.4 is interesting as disk drives go, the most important feature of a disk drive is that it should be unobtrusive. When you pop a disk into the drive, you shouldn't have to think about what you're doing

Adam Engst No comments

Formatting Options

The most work you will do with the Drive 2.4 is to figure out what size to format your disks to. Kennect does a good job at separating the many possibilities, thus helping you to avoid trouble later on

Adam Engst No comments

Negatives

The Rapport/Drive 2.4 combination isn't perfect. For one thing, many people have a SWIM chip-equipped Mac these days and it would be nice if Kennect could finish the driver so that the Drive 2.4 can do its stuff without requiring the $200 Rapport. Something about the combination tends to upset the Mac's sound driver, so when you insert a disk, SoundMaster's Insert Disk sound usually gets garbled

Adam Engst No comments

Conclusion

If you have a Mac that doesn't have a SuperDrive, then the Rapport/Drive 2.4 combination is absolutely wonderful. It's small and works flawlessly as a standard Macintosh drive, and provides disk compatibility with more formats at more sizes than you will ever need