Iomega takes Clik drive on the road

Iomega has come out with a Clik storage device in a design that can be used easily with portable computers.

The drive, which uses 40 megabyte Clik disks, will retail for $199. Disks are available at a street price of about $10 each when purchased in a 10-pack, the company said.

The drive is used in a PC Card slot which all notebook computers come with today. Most PC card devices, including modems and network cards, can be inserted and removed without powering down the computer, or so-called "hot swapping."

Iomega faces competing products which offer good deals too. For example, Drive Storage Technology offers a 2.1 gigabyte PC Card drive--about 50 times the capacity of the Clik drive--for about $300. The company also sells a 3.2GB drive for about $350. Other hard drive companies such as Integral Peripherals have also been selling high-capacity PC Card drives.

The beauty of credit-card-sized PC Card hard drives is that users can share information with almost any other notebook PC without using any extraneous equipment like cables because the drives simply pop in and out of a PC Card slot.

The Clik PC Card Drive was jointly developed by Iomega and Citizen Watch of Japan.

The drive also includes software, including Iomega's Quik Sync and Copy Machine programs. Quik Sync automatically saves files to a 40MB Clik drive while Copy Machine makes copies of a disk. Iomega anticipates worldwide shipments in the third quarter.

Iomega already sells the Clik Drive for flash memory card for digital cameras.