Ditto (drive)


The Ditto drive series was a proprietary magnetic tape data storage system released by Iomega during the 1990s. It was marketed as a backup device for personal computers.
They were released in several capacities ranging from the original Ditto 250 drive 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. Some versions of the drive were also able to read Travan-type tapes.

Technical aspects

Ditto internal drives were connected through the floppy drive channel and used MFM encoding to store data. 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 of a maximum 1 MB/s.

Discontinuation

In 1999, Iomega sold the Ditto brand and technology to Tecmar and exited the tape drive business.
The Ditto series has been discontinued. The need for higher capacities has made the Ditto series obsolete. The slow bandwidth of the Ditto also limited its usefulness compared to the Iomega REV or the older Iomega Jaz.

Models

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