modern removable media drives - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

12 Nov 1998

...
   But these are
prety tough compared to traditional magnetig
 medias (and after All, a Zip is just a high class diskette).  
>> Air filters?  Ha!  They have nothing but a shutter on the cartridge and a door
>> flap on the drive.  Absolute rubbish.  It's miraculous that they work even
for
>> a few weeks.
> Same has been said on 8" FD: These will be damaged within hours
> when the head engraves any particle ... But they worked well
> and all FD technologies thereafter.
> And on the other hand - in what way poor iomega could
> gain this amount of money, other than selling cheap
> tech at monopol prices. 
...
  I've had good results from Iomega hardware and
media ever since the
 days of the 10 Mb 8" drives that backed up the data on a Tandy 6000
 Xenix system. 
I remember these - nice piece of HW, I had two running without
any problem on an IBM-XT.

...
   The decision to go with the Zip over the Syquest
 EZ135 wasn't much of a contest.  [1] A lot of my customers at the
 end of the Eighties had serious problems with their Syquest drives 
Never had these - since the 44MB drives for the Atari
I've been using syquests all the time without any
hassle or breakdown. I had almost any type they
offered.

...
  and [2] somebody wrote a device driver for the
parallel Zip-100 for
 Linux and I felt no need to add a SCSI interface to my notebooks. 
:) I use SCSI on all my computers (if possible) starting
...
 from my Apple ][+ in 1984, so this is no issue at all.

...
  I've even gotten a Zip drive to work with a Tandy
1000 by making an
 adapter for the edge card printer connector on that machine.  If I
 was a _real programmer_ myself, I guess I'd have figured out how to
 connect it to my Tandy Z-80 and 68000 equipment. 
Nice idea - Has anyone a (generic) ATA implementation for
the Z80 and drivers for MS-DOS filesystem under CP/M ?
This could be worth do develop.

Gruss
hans

--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK