Q I need your advice on this matter, as I couldn't find this information elsewhere. I am considering buying a 2GB Jaz drive. My question is, is it fast enough to be used as a secondary hard disk? I will be using this device mainly for games. I understand that it is more expensive than an ordinary hard disk, but it also provides more flexibility.

A There are really three questions here. First, how fast is a Jaz drive compared to conventional fixed hard drives. The answer is, pretty fast. The Jaz performs as well or better than some of the drives currently on the market. It would work well for whatever purposes you put it too.

The second question is, does it make financial sense to buy a Jaz drive rather than one large hard drive. A 10GB IDE hard drive costs under $600, while a Jaz drive is close to $800 plus up to $200 for a 2GB cartridge. If you have a computer with a large case you can easily install three 10GB hard drives giving you 30GB of storage. For the same amount of money you will only get about 8 or 10GB of storage with the Jaz drive.

The Jaz drive comes into its own, of course, when you need to store and move around large amounts of data. Desktop publishing, desktop video and multimedia can all produce large files. In addition there is need to backup these files as well as move them about. To move 2GB (even internationally) a Jaz cartridge and an overnight courier might be a practical solution.

The third question is how fast does a drive need to be to be able to run games? Put more generally, how does the speed of your storage device affect particular programs? When you run an application it loads a certain proportion of the program from the disk drive (or CD-ROM) into system memory. The amount of time that this takes is determined mostly by the speed of the disk drive. Once loaded the program runs at the speed of the computer's processor and memory. Most modern programs do not load completely into memory when started. Rather they load other sections of the program when needed. For computer games where speed is essential, loads from disk are normally restricted to between levels, so drive speed may not be an issue.