I also find these tape drives quite unreliable. They would go back and forth, back and forth and it took quite some time until you had your data.

A few friends also had tape drives, and I believe we used Norton or PC Tools or one of these programs to swap games. But then the Iomega Zip 100 came along and I got that.

It was much better and I had a little case that had space for the drive, cable and power adapter. Now I could go to my friends and swap games that way.

But my biggest let down was the Spea Media FX card. I totally fell for the advertising (Sound Blaster and Roland MT-32 compatible). Lots of games had issues with the Sound Blaster compatibility. It didn't have an FM chip and used wavetable to "fake" FM and it wasn't MT-32 compatible as well...

I sold it via classified ad and got a SB16 and Sound Canvas board.

My first CD Burners always died. I had the SCSI one from Yamaha, 2x and 4x models and they constantly died (I burnt a lot of CDs back in the day). At one stage I had 3 drives with 2 in warranty...

The tape drives I had would take all night to write and verify a full tape - ridiculous! Those eventually got thrown out.

I got a HP CD writer when the first came out - I paid $350 and that was on sale. Back then being able to burn a CD was a really big deal. That thing lasted forever - burning literally hundreds of CDs.

I had quite the opposite with my Colorado Memory System tape drive, maybe due to me opting for the floppy accelorator card to go with it ?!?

It worked just fine for me, it was the Zip Drives that always gave me fits, any inteface model, I had the parallel port and the internal IDE models and both had issues from time to time.

I also purchased the iomega floppy controller card. It doubled the speed and did improve things somewhat.

The Zip drive (parallel) was a trooper. I had it for a very long time and it never let me down. But I have also heard that Zip drives can fail quite often. At least the first 100MB models.

PC Chips motherboards... 😉

But seriously, our first CD burner was a SCSI drive from Sony. 6x read, 2x write. 100% coaster rate trying to burn at 2x, 25% coaster rate at 1x. Which sucks when CD-Rs were like $5 a pop. 🙁

So yeah, that was a bit of a dud.

Floppies! I'm so glad we're [mostly] passed them. The drives are slow, noisy and bulky while the disks themselves are bulky, hold a now irrelevant amount of data and worst of all, they are so incredibly unreliable. Use a floppy more than once or twice and it's likely to be littered with bad sectors. Yet, modern computers still have them and from time to time, I even bump into people who still use them.

Maybe my experienced is reverse from that of others. The original Zip drive was slow but useful and reliable and life was fine when the IDE model came out. Despite having used multiple Zip disks several times on a daily basis with multiple drives, I have not once had the click of death that I hear about on the internet. Before USB drives caught on, they were my favorite storage medium.

Lol, you want dog slow? Try formatting a Superdisk 😜

I've gotten a couple ZIP drives of which a couple had crashed heads, but the ones that worked, still work 😀
I've also used the Parallel ZIP drive with 100MB disks and indeed it never let me down. It just works 😀

I never used zip drives. I jumped on the CD-R drive early on and never looked back

As for floppies being unreliable - well I would agree that they are. But back when they were all you had I never remember THAT many problems with them - and I used to have a drawer full! I'm almost wondering if the disk manufacturers starting cutting way back on quality in more recent years.

ncmark wrote:

I'm almost wondering if the disk manufacturers starting cutting way back on quality in more recent years.

Same here, and it would make sense actually. Floppy turned from an important means of data transfer and storage to a "standard must-be-as-cheap-as-possible", "lets toss it in there cuz everyone does" thingy.

I skipped the whole zip drive fad; my method of backup involved just keeping a couple extra spare hard drives, paired with removable hard drive enclosures for "just in case."

Pretty much anything operating on VLB I don't ever want to see again. Mainly just the hard disk controller card that I used, where data corruption occurred once every so often (but was still very frustrating nonetheless, especially when my hard drive could no longer be detected) which can be attributed to electrical issues on the bus itself.

Oh and can't forget the onboard ViRGE card that came with one of my Pentium machines. Good for 2D; playing any S3D-accelerated game resulted in pounding the keyboard and yelling profanities at the screen. Same for my old Rage II card. For a while I just looked to dedicated 3D accelerator cards (Voodoo) to handle my gaming needs.

ncmark wrote:

I never used zip drives. I jumped on the CD-R drive early on and never looked back

As for floppies being unreliable - well I would agree that they are. But back when they were all you had I never remember THAT many problems with them - and I used to have a drawer full! I'm almost wondering if the disk manufacturers starting cutting way back on quality in more recent years.

Maybe it was cost cutting, but I doubt it, at least not on the media side. The drives definitely are cheaper and not as good. I have a USB 2x floppy drive from Sony that is a CHAMP at reading and writing media my 3.5 drives will not, and most of my 3.5's are from the era where floppies were put in there so you could install an OS or do a bios flash, and that was all (hence, they were made more cheaply most likely).

The biggest problem IMO is that the media itself seems to die on the shelf. Floppies are not as enclosed as hard drives, and they are exposed to air 24x7. I think the disks themselves just plain wear out simply sitting on the shelf. I had a bunch of 3.5 media lying around a few years back and I needed to make a disk to flash a bios on a video card. None of them worked, and some were brand new. Buying more new floppies worked fine.

I guess a nice Degausser would be handy. Degauss and reformat old floppies.

For me, the biggest piece of DUD hardware was a 4x Sony DVD RW drive I got. Not only was it DVD - R only, but the thing died within months of it's purchase. Oddly enough, it works fine now after I put it in one of my boxes recently, but I'm not burning with it.

And I had a Kenwood 72x CD reader back in the day. Man it was nice (and FAST). It lasted like two years and quit, and was not replaceable. I wish they would have ported that TrueX multiple laser technology to DVD's and Blu Ray. A 32x DVD reader would be smokin hot and super fast (though I don't know if they could make a writer this way). Judging from read errors and failure rates though, they had serious problems. I think with more modern CPU's, it might be possible to build one again with a ton of overhead and you just don't care because software installs faster.

I've always had my eyes peeled for one of those Kenwood 72x drives, but could never spot one for sale, alas.

a funny thing with floppies... in my experience the old 5.25" ones were actually more reliable and durable than the 3.5" variant that became standard later on, at least when stored properly.

the 3.5" disks were much more mechanically complex, meaning many more things that could go wrong... that protective steel cover didn't really do its job that well, and sometimes actually picked up dirt all by itself. some of them would also start bending after a while, and even catch inside the drive. the whole diskette was heavier and rigid, so if you dropped it, it took a lot more damage than a featherweight 5.25" would.

the only major problem with 5.25" floppies was the whole headache with different densities and appropriate drives. Write any data using the wrong drive type and you had a dud on your hands.

When I was 4 or 5, I thought the term "floppy" only referred to the larger, flexible diskettes while the 3.5" disks were "hard disks." In my made, it certainly made much more sense.

GXL750 wrote:

Floppies! I'm so glad we're [mostly] passed them. The drives are slow, noisy and bulky while the disks themselves are bulky, hold a now irrelevant amount of data and worst of all, they are so incredibly unreliable. Use a floppy more than once or twice and it's likely to be littered with bad sectors. Yet, modern computers still have them and from time to time, I even bump into people who still use them.

Maybe my experienced is reverse from that of others. The original Zip drive was slow but useful and reliable and life was fine when the IDE model came out. Despite having used multiple Zip disks several times on a daily basis with multiple drives, I have not once had the click of death that I hear about on the internet. Before USB drives caught on, they were my favorite storage medium.

The only reason I have a floppy drive in my machine is because it was built in to the multi memory card reader that I installed in it so it all occupies one drive bay. If I had to devote a whole drive bay to a floppy I wouldn't have one.