Anyone still using Zip Drives?

Hugh Jarse · 31 Mar 2013

Hi all

In the process of clearing my garage/workshop ready for conversion to a studio come digital photo workspace I found a long "lost" storage chest and have spent about 3 hours rooting through it.

Ampongst the pile of IT kit I found loass of stuff I paid a small fortune for.

In a box inside the chest was a trio of USB 100Mb, 250Mb and 750Mb Iomega Zip drives and disks! I had forgotten I still had them!

Was wondering if anyone here still uses them?

I fired up my trusty XP laptop and loaded a few new still wrapped Zip Disks. I dug out a few stored 100Mb and lo and behold I had long forgotten pictures on the screen. Orinally from my Kodak DC25 and later Fuji Finepix 2800 Zoom (both of which I still have!).

So am wondering if anyone still uses them still?

Iomega stopped updating Iomegaware a long while back I believe and never released anything to support Vista or W7 software.

Struck me that some of the picture files are 12+ years old and all came up quick with no degradation.

Since ceasing using the zip drives I have had failed CDs DVDs Memory sticks USB HDDs but never lost a ZipDisk.

Nostalgia day here. My son just brought in an Iomega Clik disk and PCMCIA Clik laptop card, A PCMCIA Smartmedia and PCCIA Compact Flash card readers!

Oh well - i will copy my files to the Cloud. No idea right now what to do with all this "vintage" but working kit!

Interested in whether anyone else has them still.

Gr8Shot · 31 Mar 2013

We still use them at work on systems built 13 yrs ago.

Hugh Jarse · 31 Mar 2013

Gr8Shot said:
We still use them at work on systems built 13 yrs ago.

Wow

I must admit I tend to hang on to my kit

I sril have a working SX286 Vanilla PC running Windows 3.1 on 4Mb of RAM and 40Mb HDD!!!!

Still if the kit does the job!

Cadburys should have put their recipes on ZipDisk. We might still have the Lime Barrel in Milk Tray!

cosmicma · 31 Mar 2013

i still have an old syquest sparq 1gig drive with a couple of disks
a bit useless nowadays as it's parallel interface which disappeared a few years ago

i just havn't got the heart to bin it the bloody disks were 45 quid each at the time

i still have ( somewhere in the loft ) the very first cd writer i bought i think the model number was a yamaha cdr 100 scsi external drive bought back in 95/96 i think it still works too

nomad_traveller · 31 Mar 2013

Wow.. i haven't heard Zip drives for ages. I reckon the early 90s was when I had mine but no, they're long lost with the 5 1/4" disks

Hugh Jarse · 31 Mar 2013

cosmicma said:
i still have an old syquest sparq 1gig drive with a couple of disks
a bit useless nowadays as it's parallel interface which disappeared a few years ago

i just havn't got the heart to bin it the bloody disks were 45 quid each at the time

i still have ( somewhere in the loft ) the very first cd writer i bought i think the model number was a yamaha cdr 100 scsi external drive bought back in 95/96 i think it still works too

I know thst feeling. I have a secure storage unit I rent in a local town which I use for my equipment I use gor my business. Most of whtat I dug out today will be going there.

Othrr things that appeared today included a Psrallrl pot 100Mb Zip Drine. A HP Scanner which was SCSI. i think we psid £450 fot it and another £100 for a SCSI csrd which is still in one of our retired HP workstations!

I will have to WEEE a lot of kit some time.

Need yo be ruthless as I am paying rent to store kit I will not use again. And I need an empty garage/worksjop to build my dtudio!

hollis_f · 1 Apr 2013

Hugh Jarse said:
never lost a ZipDisk.

Wow. The 'Click of Death' was a regular sound at the time. I soon moved to the larger, more reliable, Jazz drives.

neil_g · 2 Apr 2013

havent seen a zip drive since i had my old pentium 60

werent they around just before writable CD became affordable? i seem to remember having a sex wee over how much they stored :lol:

seashaker · 3 Apr 2013

I would keep hold of them. I rescued an IBM 3.5" external drive and a few floppys from work when they were getting thrown out. I took a pic of the drive to put on the disk to show it working, had to downsize the pic quite a bit as the iphone photo size was considerably bigger than the 1.44mb available on the disk. When it was of suitable size, took forever to load up haha. I'm a bit of a geek so had fun doing it all

Gr8Shot · 3 Apr 2013

neil_g said:
havent seen a zip drive since i had my old pentium 60

werent they around just before writable CD became affordable? i seem to remember having a sex wee over how much they stored

100mb and 250mb drives we still use, bloody frustrating too as not all are interchangeable, so when off to jobs have to carry several disks to ensure i have the right ones.
They are so much more reliable than floppys, so often we collect data on them (because we have to) and data is destroyed by the time i get back to my office to analyse it.
USB is a god send in comparrison, but in its day zip drives were too.....oh how times change.