SyQuest EZ 135 Drive
Removable hard disk drive
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The EZ 135 Drive is a 3.5" removable-platter hard disk drive. It was introduced by SyQuest Technology in 1995. It had a maximum capacity of 135 MB per disk.[1][2]
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
Pricing
At introduction in 1995, the EZ 135 drive had the following prices:
- 135 MB cartridge: US$20 (equivalent to $42 in 2025)
- External SCSI drive: US$240 (equivalent to $507 in 2025)
- Internal IDE drive: US$200 (equivalent to $423 in 2025)
Sales
The EZ 135 Drive was designed to be a competitor to the Iomega Zip 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.
