Did any of you have a zip drive back when they were popular? What was your experience with them like, are they really as unreliable as their reputation suggests?
>>53558801
I had a SCSI Zip drive that I used with a PowerBook. I can't remember a single failure or bad disk.
Shut up retard, that's a floppy drive
pic related is a zip drive
>>53558924
no thats a usb
I had an external SCSI Zip drive, but sold it on ebay. I still have an ATAPI internal 3.5" Zip drive and a box full of 100MB Zip disks. Only 1 disk out of approximately 40 failed. I also have my Iomega Buz video capture card which I tested out a couple years ago on Linux and it still worked. Granted 352x240 MJPEG is dogshit by today's standards. Iomega never had a reputation for being unreliable. This was not their failing.
Have a ZIP drive lying around, also had one for my G3 Lombard. They worked fine, like a bigger floppy disk.
I still have one somewhere with AOE1 on it.
i carded one pre 2000 broke on me in a couple months so i gave it away, iomega 1gb tape
Bought one 2 months ago.
Its beautifull
Had a pair of SCSI ones. They were nice.
One of them did appear to go bad; sometimes it would work, sometimes it clicked, though not *quite* like the sounds I heard off the net.
So not wanting to try selling something that was possibly malfunctioning, I eventually gave them away on a local freecycle.
I had the one in your pic OP, formatted disks were like 94MB, it was not scsi but fucking parallel port, took almost an hour to fill one of those disks. Shit was cash.
I've got two, an internal and a USB one. They're okay. Haven't gotten the "click of death" on either, though there are occasional read errors. Don't really use them any more, but have them around anyway.
I have five SCSI zip drives, 1 250MB and the rest 100MB. I use them as hard drives for my Amigas. So far they work like a charm, but I'm not really stress-testing them with retrocomputing chores.
I had 2 parallel port zip drives, then later an internal IDE. Never had problem with drives or disks. I quit using them soon after recordable CD's came out. They were awesome for a while, though. I was eating through a ton of floppies trying to save all the porn that the World Wide Web had to offer.
I got the USB a few years ago just to read my old disks, but may never use it again. Everything on them is backed up elsewhere.
I had a zip drive years ago, found a couple of the disks a few months ago in poor condition. Wanted to see what was on them so bought a cheap USB zip drive off ebay and after some farting about getting rid of the password and decompressing from "drivespace3" format, I got 100% recovery of all files. Some family photos I took with a shitty first generation digital camera. If I had burned them to a CD they would not have survived that long, no way.
So to answer your question, for long term storage I found them very reliable.
>>53558801
Used them to carry around big Adobe Illustrator 6~7 files and assets for printing.
Replaced those with small CDRWs later on.
I always thought PSPs UMDs looked cool and could fullfill the need to carry around files until we started getting cheaper and cheaper usb storage.
>>53558801
The one I had (looked just like your pic) connected via parallel port, so it was extremely slow. Other than that, though, they were pretty good. Family had a desktop with an internal one, that was awesome.
However, once USB drives became larger and less expensive, $10 100-MB Zip disks just weren't that practical anymore.
>>53558801
>unreliable as their reputation suggests?
IIRC, the issue wasn't so much reliability as it was the click of death was pretty damn deadly. If you had a drive that had the click of death and you tried to read a disk, it would damage the disk. What made it nasty was that the disk would be damaged in such a way that putting it into a healthy drive could cause the click of death in that drive.
>>53558924
You must be 18+ to be here...
>>53558801
I had 100's, 250's and even a few 750's. I found the LS120/LS240 to be more useful though...
i used to use them when campus had zip support and i didn't feel like buying usb drives
turns out formatting at different temperatures causes that disk to _only_ be usable at around that temperature, and it will basically fuck your shit
>>53558801
I honestly had completely forgotten about these, I installed one as an internal in my G3 B&W, never had any problems with the disks, but they were slow even for their time. Should fire up the old beast and see what's on those old Zips.
>>53558801
I just threw one out recently, kept it for nostalgia purpose at first but then it reminded me how expensive the 100mb disks are and how horrible their durability is. Iomega zip is the 100x kike version of the 3.5 diskettes.
>>53558801
>zip drive
I had one of my own, now I've got several people have dumped on me over the years. They typically end up destroying the disk after a just a few uses. If I were to guess, I would say the most I've ever used a single disk was 100 times before it made that clicking noise that lets you know the disk and everything on it is ruined.
>>53558801
It was slow, noisy and the disks died all the time
