This one was weird as the disk looked like an IDE hard disk drive. SCSI External - Probably used more on Macs. I don't know if it actually lays out any kind of low-level format or just wipes, but over the years I encountered multiple times where doing this would appear to fix some sector read errors. Not sure about the other interfaces, but on SCSI you can use a cards low-level format option to wipe and re certify a disk. Typically only SCSI drivers, so any OS that supports your SCSI card should be able to access the drive. ![]() SCSI Internal - can be used as a generic removable drive without any drivers, like Bernoulli, or hard drive if SCSI card bios supports it. IDE/ATAPI should have been fast, but I seem to recall those being a tad more sluggish than SCSI. SCSI, however was blazing fast and efficient. Zip drives were criticized as slow or not "multimedia ready", but usually this was because people used the parallel port version a lot. The early drives were really fun, as eject mechanism was too aggressive and would spit the disk completely out of the drive and on to the desk or floor. Of course these used electrical eject mechanisms, so it might choose not to let you eject the disk, but you would never know and just press the button harder. ![]() Just like a 3.5" floppy disk, once that comes undone, it is game over. Don't even TOUCH a zip drive while it is reading a disk.ĭisassembling a bad zip disk, I noticed that the adhesive that holds the magnetic "cookie" to the metal disk at the center seems to be degrading. Early internal units have a nice big silver sticker covering various openings, presumably to keep dust out. The drive heads are tiny and very easily ripped to shreds by dust, dirt, or damaged disks. I remember back when these were new, accidentally dropping a drive just a few feet on to a concrete floor - it looked fine but would no longer read disks. These disks and drives were fragile when they were new. Much like a 3.5" floppy disk, they used a spinning magnetic disk enclosed in a plastic cartridge, with a small metal shutter that gave the drive access to to the disk surface. It was basically a successor to Iomega's much larger Bernoulli drive, it competed against the SuperDisk LS-120, and it could store much more than a regular floppy drive. The original Iomega Zip 100 drive was a fairly popular storage device. Thanks in advance for any info/advice you guys can share.After some frustrating fiddling with a few Zip drives, just got me thinking about a few things. I might be tempted to buy that machine if I wasn't worried the only thing in the PC case was a burnt out motherboard and broken CPU. But what it didn't have was a description, other than a statement that the seller didn't accept returns. I actually looked at some vintage PCs on eBay and saw a 486 clone that from the pictures not only had a parallel port, but appeared to have an internal Zip Drive for $450 with shipping. ![]() Does anyone know if a USB Zip drive will work with Windows 10? I am willing to spend that much, but I am concerned there will be driver and/or Windows 10 issues. There are USB Zip Drives available on eBay for between $16 and $60. I am not sure if the drive I have still works, but as I don't have a PC with a parallel port, it doesn't really matter. But since I haven't accessed any of these disks in well over 20 years, there are limits to how much I am willing to spend. I would like to find something that will let me read those disks because there may be pictures or other files I would like to have. There were probably backups of my 486 PC and files I moved to a zip disk to make room on my 420 MB HD. I know, imagine a disk that could store a whole 100 MB!!! I don't remember exactly what is stored on those disks. There were also a number of 100 MB zip disks. In those boxes was a Zip Drive (parallel port version) I had purchased in or around 1996. My family recently sold the house I grew up in requiring me to remove a number of boxes that I had stored there.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |