The SparQ drive is a removable-disk
hard drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnet ...
made by
SyQuest Technology. It was introduced in 1997, available as an internal or external version. The internal version utilized an
IDE interface, and the external version used a
parallel port
In computing, a parallel port is a type of interface found on early computers (personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals. The name refers to the way the data is sent; parallel ports send multiple bits of data at once ( parallel ...
. The disk can store 1
GB of data. As a removable-disk hard drive, it contains a solid
hard disk platter on which the data is stored.
When the SparQ drive was launched, it was relatively cheap. Compared to the
Zip drive
The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 250 ...
whose 100 MB disk could cost US$22, a 1 GB SparQ disk could cost US$39 — slightly less than twice the cost for ten times the storage capacity.
Quality issues
A few months after the launch, users began to complain that the drives had serious quality issues, causing them to break. The damage to its
public image and
warranty obligations of SyQuest were major factors behind the company's bankruptcy.
After its bankruptcy, SyQuest retained its rights to produce and sell the drive, which it continued to sell online directly to consumers. The price increased compared to when the drive was launched, so it was primarily for businesses that still relied on the drive and people who wanted to read old SparQ disks. By October 2008, the website was no longer active.
The SparQ had a serious
failure mode
Failure causes are defects in design, process, quality, or part application, which are the underlying cause of a failure or which initiate a process which leads to failure. Where failure depends on the user of the product or process, then human er ...
which damaged SparQ disks in such a way that they would damage subsequent SparQ drives in which they were placed. Inserting a broken disk in a SparQ drive will cause the drive to break any new disks placed in that drive. These broken disks could break additional drives, breaking most of the drives in an office in short order.
See also
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EZ 135 Drive
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.
A successor drive, known as the SyQuest EZFlyer, was released in 1996. It was backwa ...
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Orb Drive
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Zip drive
The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 250 ...
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Jaz drive
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Iomega REV
REV is a removable hard disk storage system from Iomega.
The small removable disks store 35, 70, or 120 gigabytes (GB) and are hard-drive technology. Like a standard hard drive, the REV system uses a flying head to read and write data to a spinnin ...
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Bernoulli Box
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Ditto drive
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LS-120 drive
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Click of death
Click of death is a term that had become common in the late 1990s referring to the clicking sound in disk storage systems that signals a disk drive has failed, often catastrophically.
The clicking sound itself arises from the unexpected movemen ...
References
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Syquest Sparq Drive
SyQuest storage devices
Hard disk drives