(SyQuest Technology, Inc., Fremont, CA) An earlier manufacturer of removable disk drives, founded in 1982 by Syed Iftikar (Sy's Quest). It originally made 3.9" drives for the military and introduced its first 5.25" drive in 1986, essentially pioneering the removable, hard disk industry for personal computers. Its drives became de facto standards in the graphics arts and printing industries with more than a million units sold by 1994. SyQuest subsequently introduced several new drives, all of which were incompatible with its first-generation drives and each other.
In late 1998, SyQuest filed for Chapter 11 and later sold its assets to Iomega, its archrival. The competition in the removable market was fierce in the late 1990s after Iomega's introduction of its Zip and Jaz drives. See
SyQuest disk,
EZFlyer disk,
SyJet disk,
SparQ disk and
Quest disk.