SyQuest Technology, Inc., now known as SYQT, Inc., was an early entrant into the removable hard disk market for personal computers. The company was started in 1982 by Syed Iftikar; it was named partially after himself because of a company meeting wherein it was decided that "SyQuest" ought to be a shortened name for "Sy's Quest". Its earliest products were 3.9" (100mm) removable hard drives, and 3.9" (100mm) ruggedized hard drives for IBM XT compatibles and military applications. Some of their early fixed drives appear to be rebranded Seagate drives, especially when one compares the drive lists on this data recovery site with this product table.
For many years SyQuest was the most popular means of transferring large desktop publisher documents to printers. SyQuest marketed their products as able to give personal computer users "endless" hard drive space for data-intensive applications like desktop publishing, Internet information management, pre-press, multimedia, audio, video, digital photography, fast backup, data exchange and archiving, along with confidential data security and easy portability for the road.
After 1995 they did not fare well in the market. SyQuest's core desktop publishing customers began increasingly to use CD-R media and FTP to transfer files, while Iomega's Zip drives dominated the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) market. Over the period 1995 to 1997 sales declined, resulting in a series of losses. In the first quarter of 1997 those losses had been reduced to $6.8 million with net revenues increasing to $48.3 million. This compares to a net loss of $33.8 million, or $2.98 per share, on net revenues of $78.7 million for the same period the year before.
SyQuest filed for bankruptcy in late 1998, and portions of the company were subsequently purchased by Iomega Corp. in January, 1999. SyQuest retained the rights to sell their remaining inventory, on condition of renaming themselves SYQT in order to continue operations. For several subsequent years, a Web site at www.SYQT.com sold disk drives and media, and provided software downloads in support of those products. As of January 22, 2009, that Web site ceased to exist.
A significant reason for the losses was due to quality issues with a series of products, including the SparQ Drive and SyJet drives, that caused a large number of the drives to malfunction within just a few months of initial operation. Many users were frustrated at the lack of backwards compatibility as disk capacity increased. The life expectancy of a SyQuest disk was uncertain, as high usage could sometimes contribute to failure. The relative ease of use and inexpensive media of Iomega's Zip disks led to SyQuest's quick demise by the end of the 1990s.
Syquest's product line included such devices as the following: (The 5.25" removable cartridge drives with 44MB, 88MB, and 200MB capacities were mostly used on Macintosh systems via the SCSI interface.)
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This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.