It must be connected to a computer port with driver support or else it does not initialize proper iirc.
found this FAQ: http://web.archive.org/web/20000517195955/htt … ments/2140.html

Horun wrote on 2023-01-03, 00:33:

It must be connected to a computer port with driver support or else it does not initialize proper iirc.
found this FAQ: http://web.archive.org/web/20000517195955/htt … ments/2140.html

Thanks! But nevermind, the problem was my very own stupidity. So for the record:

You cannot operate the drive without the top half of the case. It has a piece of plastic that acts as a stop to prevent the disk from sliding too far inside the drive when inserting it. Without that, you will slide the disk into what -seems- to be its natural position, but it is actually not. You can slide it in carefully to about 2-3mm before that position is reached and keep holding it there against the spring tension. Then the drive will not show the slow blinking LED error, but instead spin up the motor and move the heads back and forth indefinitely (without a cable attached).

It looks just like in this vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW7HKP100zI

Zip drives are kind of living their own bizarre life.... I suspect they act more or less the same as a Jazz drive, but I never had a chance to test out Jazz drives. But I have tested one Zip drive, once, to see if it was working. But that is more than 5 years ago. Just saying that they work way different than other drive technologies.

brostenen wrote on 2023-01-03, 10:29:

Zip drives are kind of living their own bizarre life.... I suspect they act more or less the same as a Jazz drive, but I never had a chance to test out Jazz drives. But I have tested one Zip drive, once, to see if it was working. But that is more than 5 years ago. Just saying that they work way different than other drive technologies.

I think for the time, the actual storage technology of zip drives wasn't bad. From what I see, it seems quite superior to floppies. The heads are moved on a fixed rail without stepper motor or additional mechanics, and the disk itself protects the surface much better than floppy disks do. Of course, I can imagine those flimsy harddrive-like heads getting bent pretty easily when broken or warped disks are inserted.

And the build quality of the actual drive doesn't seem very good. There is not a single screw inside and almost no metal parts. Everything needed to keep the mechanics in place is molded into the plastic case parts. I think because of that, the case needed to be molded with very tight tolerances and they had to use a pretty hard plastics mixture to accomplish that. This could explain why zip drive cases are so extremely brittle, more than anything I came across so far. It is totally made to a price point, and I don't think it justified a retail price of 200$ back in the day. In comparison, a CDROM drive in 1997 did cost only half the money while the mechanics of these older drives were still comparably sturdy.

brostenen wrote on 2023-01-03, 10:29:

Zip drives are kind of living their own bizarre life.... I suspect they act more or less the same as a Jazz drive, but I never had a chance to test out Jazz drives. But I have tested one Zip drive, once, to see if it was working. But that is more than 5 years ago. Just saying that they work way different than other drive technologies.

I have a mix of both Internal and External 100/250 zip drives and they can either be one of the easiest things to get working or one of the most frustrating, my guess is they pick a day of the week for which they choose.

The easiest one I have to get working is the SCSI internal one which just fucking works.

Looking at grabbing a Zip 750 just to see if the insanity extended to that model too 🤣

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-03, 11:03:

I have a mix of both Internal and External 100/250 zip drives and they can either be one of the easiest things to get working or […]
Show full quote

brostenen wrote on 2023-01-03, 10:29:

Zip drives are kind of living their own bizarre life.... I suspect they act more or less the same as a Jazz drive, but I never had a chance to test out Jazz drives. But I have tested one Zip drive, once, to see if it was working. But that is more than 5 years ago. Just saying that they work way different than other drive technologies.

I have a mix of both Internal and External 100/250 zip drives and they can either be one of the easiest things to get working or one of the most frustrating, my guess is they pick a day of the week for which they choose.

The easiest one I have to get working is the SCSI internal one which just fucking works.

Looking at grabbing a Zip 750 just to see if the insanity extended to that model too 🤣

It is the internal SCSI that I have, and the only one that I have tried in my life. I also only have one disk.

brostenen wrote on 2023-01-03, 10:29:

Zip drives are kind of living their own bizarre life.... I suspect they act more or less the same as a Jazz drive, but I never had a chance to test out Jazz drives. But I have tested one Zip drive, once, to see if it was working. But that is more than 5 years ago. Just saying that they work way different than other drive technologies.

Jaz drives can be as temperamental as Zip drives, I've personally got two 2GB Jaz drives, one older green V2000S drive, and a newer model that is grey-blueish.. The green drive I got it along with some disks but the drive itself was dead on arrival, it would take the disk in, spin it up and it would sit here, not even unlatching the heads or doing a seek test.

I don't know what happened with that drive, it had no evidence of physical trauma (like a drop or anything like that), though I did hear that some older Jaz drives had a bug in their firmware that would cause the drive to brick itself, maybe it's that, maybe it's something else... I don't know, and have no way to know as this drive is long gone as I tore it apart to examine the mechanism for any damage, you'd be surprised to know that external 2GB Jaz drives under the hood are just a internal drive (V2000SI) slapped into a enclosure with a SCSI adapter board (that plugs into the drive's IDC50, Molex and jumper block) connected to it. Reminds me of external LS-120 drives for some reason.

Technology, old and new alike, can have its fair share of idiosyncrasies, quirks and other mysterious things that can or can't be explained.

As for Zip drives, I personally got two 100MB drives, one internal (Z100SI) and external (Z100S2) both SCSI, only one disk, so far I haven't got any issues with them, I use them to shuttle data from my Power Macintosh 7500 and my LC II (after it'll be recapped).. They work nicely for that purpose.

Oh and one last thing, Parallel port Zip drives, internally are SCSI drives with a SCSI-LPT bridge chip duct taped on it. Think of it as the "Jaz Traveller" adapter which was the same thing, a Parallel to SCSI bridge.

I keep a couple of these things around to shuffle data to/from systems that don't have an easier bulk-transfer method - my X68000 being a prime example; although it uses a SCSI2SD, there's no easy means to get data on/off a Sharp/Human68k filesystem (neither Windows or Linux can read it except as an image file in ancient tool called 'DiskExplorer'), so.... it hosts an external Zip 250 SCSI drive, and I have one of the very late Zip 250 USB (the semi-transparent, rounded model) that I hang off my Linux workstation.

The USB model 'just works', thanks to Linux. I also have a Zip 100 ATAPI drive in a 386, but I hardly ever use it as the system also has a CF drive - it's mainly as a backup method for getting data on/off the X68000. As long as everything just uses FAT16, all the drives talk to each other (obviously only 100MB disks in the ATAPI drive!).

Back when these came out I was an early adopter and had a Zip 100 IDE in my desktop. It worked well for a while and then succumbed to the click of death. I got a refurbished drive and half a dozen disks from Iomega when I complained. I never trusted it after that. These days the disks are never used for anything approaching backup, only for shuffling data about.

I *did* have to buy two of the SCSI 250 drives to find a working one. The first one I bought almost fell apart when I looked at it, just like someone else described, above!