(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Are 100MB ZIP Drives still useful?

Zip Drives come in four flavors and two capacities.
The flavors are IDE, SCSI, USB, and Parallel connection.
The capacities are 100 and 250 megs.
They have a habit of dying from what is normally referred to as "The Click of Death"
So as far as being good for data storage, I would not trust them as far as a USB flash drive/stick.
In their time, they served a purpose.
But with prices of USB flash drives going down and capacities going up, they are more of a conversation piece.

I have a 250 meg SCSI zip drive on my PC as well as two IDE connection types in a drawer.
I never use the one hooked to my PC.

There was also a 750mb ZIP disk and drive at some point. I can still buy ZIP disks from my local radio shack at some absurd price -- they have them only because nobody in the town has purchased them.

ZIP drives are old, man, times have moved on.

Well I am using it with my old dell.

I'm sorry to hear that

Don't write it past the end of the disc, or you will lose everything, and any other disc you put in that drive will be destroyed.

>>>>> Are 100MB ZIP Drives still useful?


Yes, but you can buy a USB memory stick with much greater storage capacity for $10.

OTOH, some folks just enjoy using what they have for free, it's your choice.

Also keep in mind ZIP drives are very slow I/O, even compared to USB memory sticks.

BTW, I should add, when I volunteer for rummage sales, we get donations of ZIP hardware. No one ever buys them, even at $1 or $2 apiece. We usualy end up tossing them at the end of the sale.

Got my zip100 back in the day when thumb and flashcards were about the same capacity (hp digital cameras shipped with an 8mb card, lol). Used it a lot for external storage (even floppies, back when everyone's comp had a floppy drive and you could give 'em away or mail for cheap).

Knew the change was in effect when disk price dropped sharply (I still bought a few since the capacity is a decent in-between). Used to be puppy would fit on a 100mb disk but there wasn't much room for a savefile

Still got a bunch of vintage s/w and stuff on 'em - guess I'm just lucky I only got the 'click-of-death' once (e-mail storage of all things, opera did a much better job wiping out my old newsgroup storage when 927 auto-updated to 950 with those ugly black icons .. not much of a loss, but more of a wakeup to auto-anything).

On the other other hand, I should probably pitch some LS120(?) disks since I haven't seen one of those for quite awhile..

Well I also have 3 USB Flash drives (1x 1GB, 1x 4GB, 1x 16GB), but I never got use a zip drive.