1 Dec
2009
1 Dec
'09
1:29 p.m.
On 1 Dec 2009 at 19:36, Philip Pemberton wrote:
Ah, but how many of those Zip drives are still in
working order?
Lots. Down at the recycler, they still get 100MB very frequently and
someone's always trying to give one away on Freecycle, it seems.
As I recall, the main failure mode was damaged (or
badly manufactured)
discs ripping the heads off the mounting arm. Once this happened, that
drive would destroy any disc inserted into it from then onwards. In
some cases, those discs would then become "killer discs" thus
destroying more Zip drives, and so on and so on.
The Jaz drives were far worse in this respect.
I've got a ZipPlus and the parallel cable
somewhere; it more or less
works, but needs a new power supply. Can't be bothered spending money
on something I'm not going to use... I don't think I've used it since
I got my first CD writer (a Freecom 8x4x32, aka Philips CDD4801 --
still doing sterling service in my brother's PC).
Do what I did with my first parallel-port Zip drive--make an adapter
cable that siphons power off the keyboard jack. I used an adapter
that came with a (mumble, not Trantor/Adaptec) parallel-to-SCSI
controller. The Zip needs just +5.
--Chuck