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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. At least until Uncle Bill who has an old Apple IIe comes to visit and wants to look at something on a ProDOS disk.

I think the price of the Rapport/Drive 2.4 combination is a bit high at $195 for the Rapport and $325 for the Drive 2.4, given the dropping prices for other forms of mass storage. As I said before, I am waiting for the SWIM chip version of the software, though I realize that it may be a long time before they get it working. Doing everything on 2.4 MB disks is cheaper than using the smaller disks as well, since HD disks formatted to 2.4 MB disks cost about 47[cts] per MB, while 800K disks run about 65[cts] per MB and HD disks at 1.4 MB are way up there at 82[cts] per meg. (These disk prices are based on Maya Computer’s bulk disk prices of 52[cts] for a DD disk and $1.15 for an HD disk.) Of course a SyQuest cartridge runs about $2.02 per meg, so floppies remain as one of the cheapest ways to back up.

So until the 20 MB floppy drives that also read and write older formats (working on one of those, Kennect?) come out, the Drive 2.4 is the best floppy drive on the market. If you want another floppy drive, I recommend it highly. Oh, and if you were wondering, the Finder bug I spoke of does not affect the Drive 2.4. Guess Kennect must have fixed the bug by themselves.


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