28 Feb
2008
28 Feb
'08
4:10 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 27 Feb 2008 at 19:01, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
There are also 750 MB Zip drives. They go for decent prices on eBay, these days, as the
era of the Zip drive is pretty much over.
I have Zip drives in all capacities, both internal and external models, and I haven't
had one of them fail, yet. But I never owned one of the "original" 100 MB
models, so I can't comment on them. I do believe this was the model that earned the
Zip drive its reputation of unreliability, with the "Click of Death" problems.
The 250 MB drives are horrendously slow when writing 100 MB media, and the 750 MB ones
can't write 100 MB media at all. This is the kind of thing that bites one in the
behind at the most inconvenient of times, of course.
Officially, Zip drives only work on PC's and Macs, but I am yet to encounter a machine
that won't recognise them as ordinary hard drives. I have internal (ATA and SCSI)
drives in some machine, and external USB (250) and FireWire (750) drives, meaning I most
of my machines can use Zip drives to perform quick sneakernet data transfer. Still easier
and faster than burning CD's, although availability of a fast network does negate
their usefulness somewhat.
,xtG
.tsooJ
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.