Ditto Drive
Tape Data Recovery - Ditto Drive
Ditto Drive refers to a series of magnetic tape data storage system introduced by Iomega in the 1990s. They were designed as backup device for personal computers.
Ditto drives were available in different capacities. While the original Ditto drives were available in 250 MB compressed capacity per cartridge, later versions such as the DittoMAX drives had a compatible format with compressed capacities up to 10GB per cartridge. To accomplish this, the cartridges were constructed with longer form factor.
Curiously, Some versions of the Ditto drives were capable of reading Travan-type tapes.
Ditto drives were available in both internal and external versions. Internal drives were connected through the floppy drive channel and used MFM encoding to store data. Ditto external drives were connected to the parallel port. It also was provided with a print-through port that allowed a printer to operate while daisy-chained to the Ditto drive, a feature found in the popular Iomega Zip drives. The parallel port also allowed for transfer speeds (in EPP mode) of maximum 1 MB/s.
In 1999, Iomega sold the Ditto brand and technology to Tecmar and exited the tape drive business. The demand for higher capacity drives made the Ditto drives obsolete. Also, the slow bandwidth of the Ditto drives made them less competitive than their rival Iomega REV or Iomega Jaz drives. They were soon withdrawn from the market.
