Reply 21220 of 27559, by Kahenraz
- Rank
- l33t
My dad gave me his old Jaz drives and disks a few years ago and asked me to recover the data from them, since they used an external SCSI interface he could no longer connect to.
Most of the disks I inserted exploded inside the drive as they tried to spin up. What had happened was the plastic housing of the disk cartridges had become brittle and the force of the platters spinning up caused them to detach and ricochet around inside. I think out of a dozen or so disks maybe one or two were recoverable.
My mom gave me a stack of Zip disks to recover as well, but they are in a box somewhere. Maybe they will explode as well?
I grew up with Zip disks and have fond memories of them. But I would be afraid to use them for anything retro that was not considered volatile. It's a shame, really. They were great technology for the time. I wish LS-120 had become a thing instead, since the drives were backwards compatible with floppy disks. In all my years of computing, I have never actually encountered an LS-120 drive in the wild.