LGR Oddware - The Iomega ZIP Drive Experience
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
CHRISMENENDEZ
Sure they're obsolete, but I don't think they were that odd. They were pretty common, especially for Mac users because they were mostly photographers and designers and had so much data it was just cheaper to buy Zip drives (I think there was even a Mac model with an integrated Zip drive. This was before writable CDs were common and cheap, and the first burners were very unreliable.
I don't think Iomega's quality was really that good. My first DVD burner was a Iomega back in 2003 and it only lasted like a year before it stopped burning discs for some reason, but kept reading them without a problem. I didn't know the company was still around but I've read that they disappeared for good in 2018.
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Sure they're obsolete, but I don't think they were that odd. They were pretty common, especially for Mac users because they were mostly photographers and designers and had so much data it was just cheaper to buy Zip drives (I think there was even a Mac model with an integrated Zip drive. This was before writable CDs were common and cheap, and the first burners were very unreliable.
I don't think Iomega's quality was really that good. My first DVD burner was a Iomega back in 2003 and it only lasted like a year before it stopped burning discs for some reason, but kept reading them without a problem. I didn't know the company was still around but I've read that they disappeared for good in 2018.
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TheSteelRodent
in my high school graphics class around 2000 we had USB ZIP drives to move files between the different Mac machines (because there was no network) and to backup our work, and those were incredibly slow as well since USB 1 isn't much better suited for transferring files than parallel. We only had one or two drives we moved around between machines, but we had a lot of issues with some disks only working with some machines for reasons we never figured out. Like we could write to a disk on one machine, move the drive to a different one, and then the disk wouldn't be readable. Don't know if that was an issue with the zip disks or the Macs, since they would've run something like MacOS 8. 5 or similar
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in my high school graphics class around 2000 we had USB ZIP drives to move files between the different Mac machines (because there was no network) and to backup our work, and those were incredibly slow as well since USB 1 isn't much better suited for transferring files than parallel. We only had one or two drives we moved around between machines, but we had a lot of issues with some disks only working with some machines for reasons we never figured out. Like we could write to a disk on one machine, move the drive to a different one, and then the disk wouldn't be readable. Don't know if that was an issue with the zip disks or the Macs, since they would've run something like MacOS 8. 5 or similar
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opisex
I had one of their tape drives. 2gb of backup space WOOT! backup my hard drive like 3 times over.
I never had the zip drive when it was current. but if you had a zip drive when it was on the market that was the shizniz, instant nerd cred, 100mb in your hand was a LOT back then.
I did have the ls120 superdisk though. the IDE model. I though the concept was good because it would still read/write normal floppies. and it had a cool electronic ejection, I thought it's backwards compatibility would give it a good life span. I was wrong.
sadly mine quite reading 120mb disks after about 6months just long enough for warranty to expire. it still reads 1. 44 floppies oddly.
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I had one of their tape drives. 2gb of backup space WOOT! backup my hard drive like 3 times over.
I never had the zip drive when it was current. but if you had a zip drive when it was on the market that was the shizniz, instant nerd cred, 100mb in your hand was a LOT back then.
I did have the ls120 superdisk though. the IDE model. I though the concept was good because it would still read/write normal floppies. and it had a cool electronic ejection, I thought it's backwards compatibility would give it a good life span. I was wrong.
sadly mine quite reading 120mb disks after about 6months just long enough for warranty to expire. it still reads 1. 44 floppies oddly.
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lucidbarrier
I used to have the NEC internal Zip drive. One day I went to the college library before class and they had a full speed T1 connection and no one in computer lab. The lab had internal zip disk drives in their computers. This was before USB drives and USB took off. We didn't even have mp3 players yet. I bought and internal drive and some discs and would go download before class. I had that thing in each computer build afterwards until the latest iteration. I just painted the front faceplate with Krylon in black so that it would match my cases. I really never got into the later drives and Jaz drives, etc, because Sandisk made some killer USB flash drives and MP3 players.
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I used to have the NEC internal Zip drive. One day I went to the college library before class and they had a full speed T1 connection and no one in computer lab. The lab had internal zip disk drives in their computers. This was before USB drives and USB took off. We didn't even have mp3 players yet. I bought and internal drive and some discs and would go download before class. I had that thing in each computer build afterwards until the latest iteration. I just painted the front faceplate with Krylon in black so that it would match my cases. I really never got into the later drives and Jaz drives, etc, because Sandisk made some killer USB flash drives and MP3 players.
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Vortex1988
I'm still surprised these weren't more widely adopted. I never had one growing up and my friends never had one either. The only computers I remember having them were in my elementary school computer lab. Although, I guess we were never transporting files big enough to need one. I always had my school projects saved on floppy disks, and by the time my friends and I were transferring bigger game files, mods, and music, flash drives had pretty much taken over. I just remember our school librarian telling us about zip disks and that was the first and last time I ever remember anyone mentioning them.
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I'm still surprised these weren't more widely adopted. I never had one growing up and my friends never had one either. The only computers I remember having them were in my elementary school computer lab. Although, I guess we were never transporting files big enough to need one. I always had my school projects saved on floppy disks, and by the time my friends and I were transferring bigger game files, mods, and music, flash drives had pretty much taken over. I just remember our school librarian telling us about zip disks and that was the first and last time I ever remember anyone mentioning them.
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John
I work at a university, and the year I started my old job a guy who had spent his entire career with us finally gave up the ghost and retired. He cleaned his office out mostly by himself, but as the newbie I was sent to go and check up that everything had been done correctly. I found one of these with an incomprehensible sticky note and a pile of zip discs in an old New Balance shoe box. I didn't know what they were. My boss told me to trash it, but there's a little corner of the storage closet with an old New Balance box. I'm going to leave it there for posterity.
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I work at a university, and the year I started my old job a guy who had spent his entire career with us finally gave up the ghost and retired. He cleaned his office out mostly by himself, but as the newbie I was sent to go and check up that everything had been done correctly. I found one of these with an incomprehensible sticky note and a pile of zip discs in an old New Balance shoe box. I didn't know what they were. My boss told me to trash it, but there's a little corner of the storage closet with an old New Balance box. I'm going to leave it there for posterity.
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Nathan
The parallel port drive could be much faster if you didn't use the defaults in iomega's -guest- program. The defaults used a very inefficient transfer mode that worked on the oldest parallel ports. On a computer with EPP or ECP functionality, transfer rates were several times faster if the driver was manually configured to match the capabilities of your hardware. In the cases of ECP, the drive could keep up with the USB or IDE version, at around 400-600K/second depending on the region of the disk it was reading/writing.
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The parallel port drive could be much faster if you didn't use the defaults in iomega's -guest- program. The defaults used a very inefficient transfer mode that worked on the oldest parallel ports. On a computer with EPP or ECP functionality, transfer rates were several times faster if the driver was manually configured to match the capabilities of your hardware. In the cases of ECP, the drive could keep up with the USB or IDE version, at around 400-600K/second depending on the region of the disk it was reading/writing.
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fanjoy
hey. I love your videos.
I think you missed something about the FindIt application for Zip disks
It's not only a simple file manager. I keeps all trees and files catalogs of all you zip disks collection.
and allow you to find a file you are looking fo r even when the disk is not present in the drive and it will tell you on which zip disk the file is.
this feature was quite useful.
I was looking for a similar software which is working with burnt Cd or Dvd. any clue is welcome
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hey. I love your videos.
I think you missed something about the FindIt application for Zip disks
It's not only a simple file manager. I keeps all trees and files catalogs of all you zip disks collection.
and allow you to find a file you are looking fo r even when the disk is not present in the drive and it will tell you on which zip disk the file is.
this feature was quite useful.
I was looking for a similar software which is working with burnt Cd or Dvd. any clue is welcome
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Richard
I had also an external Zip drive in use back in the 90s. I never realized that it was that slow in comparison to the internal version. In 2001 I even purchased an external USB Version with 250MB disks. But a few years later USB stick became cheaper and cheaper with more and more storage space and the whole Zip drive became obsolete. Same as my JAZ drives, of which I had a 1GB and a 2GB version. But that's a whole different story. Obviously I had too much money to waste on computer crap. ;-)
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I had also an external Zip drive in use back in the 90s. I never realized that it was that slow in comparison to the internal version. In 2001 I even purchased an external USB Version with 250MB disks. But a few years later USB stick became cheaper and cheaper with more and more storage space and the whole Zip drive became obsolete. Same as my JAZ drives, of which I had a 1GB and a 2GB version. But that's a whole different story. Obviously I had too much money to waste on computer crap. ;-)
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JoeCensored
Parallel port version was the most useful as a portable storage solution. The internal IDE was the best if you had several computers. But parallel was useful because you could just bring the entire drive to copy something if the other system didnt have a zip drive. It almost got to the point of a standard component of all computers, was really close. I remember we were selling them in 80% of computers for a couple years.
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Parallel port version was the most useful as a portable storage solution. The internal IDE was the best if you had several computers. But parallel was useful because you could just bring the entire drive to copy something if the other system didnt have a zip drive. It almost got to the point of a standard component of all computers, was really close. I remember we were selling them in 80% of computers for a couple years.
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