27 Feb
2008
27 Feb
'08
5:17 p.m.
On 27 Feb 2008 at 19:01, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
Although both the drive and media have the word
"Zip" on them,
I didn't notice until you helped me to remember that they are
indeed called Zip drives. I feel I was fortunate to have the
internal SCSI version. For the PC, there is a full set of software
tools available. For the PDP-11, they are just nice ordinary
drives with removable media - although the software WRITE
PROTECT feature requires the PC software tools to toggle the
status of the media.
The thing that was nice about the Zip drives was that they
represented 100MB of inexpensive storage when most of the
alternatives were pretty pricey. Very popular with the Macintosh
crowd, Apple offered them as an option. There is a 250MB Zip drive
also, but they seem not to be as popular as the 100MB version--and I
don't know a thing about their reliability as compared to their
smaller cousins.
Nowadays, if I need a few hundred megabytes of temporary offline
storage, I use a USB flash drive. In the 1GB size, particularly at
clearance prices, they offer a fairly good bang for the buck.
Cheers,
Chuck