The company was founded on January 27, 1982 [2] by Syed Iftikar who had been a founder of Seagate,[3] along with Ben Alaimo, Bill Krajewski, Anil Nigam and George Toldi.

SyQuest marketed its 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.

[7] The introduction of lower-cost options like the Zip drive which offered similar capacity, and later the CD-R which was much less expensive once it reached mass-market, seriously eroded SyQuest's sales and the company went bankrupt in 1998.

Their 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.

[14][1] Portions of the company were purchased by Iomega Corp. in January 1999, with SyQuest retaining the right to sell its remaining inventory on condition of renaming themselves SYQT.