Ditto drive
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The Ditto Drive series was a proprietary tape-based storage medium released by Iomega during the 1990s. Its main intent is to be a backup device for hard drives. The drives and cartridges were a dark red color.
They were released in several capacities ranging from the original Ditto 250 drive (250MB compressed capacity per cartridge) to the DittoMAX drive, a compatible format with compressed capacities up to 10GB per cartridge. This was accomplished by increasing the physical size of the cartridge (making it longer). Some versions of the drive were also able to read Travan-type tapes.
Ditto internal drives were unique to the usual design of internal devices. The Ditto internal series was connected through the floppy drive channel and used MFM encoding to store data (the same method as on older floppy drives). An ISA accelerator card called the Ditto Dash, providing higher speed than a stock floppy controller, was also available.
Ditto external drives were connected to the parallel port and offered a print-through port which allowed a printer to operate while daisy-chained to the Ditto drive. This is a feature also commonly found on an Iomega ZIP drive. Usage of the parallel port allowed for transfer speeds (in EPP mode) of only a maximum 1 MB/s. This may have attributed to the downfall of the Ditto drive because it is very slow compared to today's connection standards (USB and FireWire).
The Ditto series has been discontinued. The need for higher capacities has made the Ditto series obsolete. Faster access times that could not be achieved with tape-based media has been replaced with fixed magnetic media such as enclosed hard drive platters in the Iomega REV or the older (and discontinued) Iomega Jaz.
