Well, the drive costs $359....but for that price you get 5 disks (1 Gig). To buy a Zip drive and a gig's worth of disks would cost about the same...maybe a little less. APS sells their own version for $299, but it only comes with one cart...still, the cartridges are only $10 a piece, so if you want 1-2 gigs of removable storage, it's cheaper to go with the Sys.230. Also, I've heard ZIP disks can be fairly unreliable and are very fragile. (And the drive is ugly as sin!)