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.
Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]