Anyone remember this Iomega Zip competitor?

[PliotronX]

I was going through boxes of my dads stuff with him and found a couple of Zip disks. Touched on memories I had of a similar removable media but it was supposed to be faster and hold more than the original 100MB Zip and was based on Winchester design (a la HDD?). Anyway, I cant get any hits or pictures. I didnt think this media was that obscure at the time but wow lol. I could swear it was manufactured or designed by Western Digital and the closest I could find was Syquest media but I dont recognize the name, cartridges, nor drives. I am pretty sure these cartridges came in 200-250MB. Any ideas?

 

[LTC8K6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_EZ_135_Drive


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk

?

 

[PliotronX]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_EZ_135_Drive


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk

?

Ah! It was the EZFlyer, compatible with those EZ135 disks! That's the one yeah I loved that thing. Then blank CDRs got inexpensive! Thank you!

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Sparq was better.

 

[SKORPI0]

 

[mikeymikec]

These zip disks did have the virtue of looking higher-tech than floppy disks, like how Windows icons went from 16 to 256 colours and started to have cool shading

 

[IronWing]

Oh those new fangled Zip drives.

Somewhere, probably in a landfill, all my thesis data is resting on one of these.

 

[whm1974]

Ah! It was the EZFlyer, compatible with those EZ135 disks! That's the one yeah I loved that thing. Then blank CDRs got inexpensive! Thank you!

I almost brought one of those when they came out. How long did they sell for anyway?

 

[aigomorla]

I had a zip drive....
It was repalced to a scsi Plextor cd-r later tho.

I used to hate SCSI and getting IRQ's properly setup, thank god PATA CD-R's came out quickly....
However i think i loved the speed of an SCSI more then PATA so i forced myself to love something i hate... sort of like my EX....

 

[shortylickens]

SCSI was a pain but for a little while it was the fastest interface available.

 

[PliotronX]

Sparq was better.

Probably but I had saved up for that EZFlyer so I only knew my old man's Zip and this thing!

Ah fond memories, I was geeking out hard when my dad got one

These zip disks did have the virtue of looking higher-tech than floppy disks, like how Windows icons went from 16 to 256 colours and started to have cool shading

I remember thinking the same! And the windows 2000 hack to enable 8-bit color icons in the shell haha

Oh those new fangled Zip drives.

Somewhere, probably in a landfill, all my thesis data is resting on one of these.

Probably the granddaddy! When I was looking at the Syquests that Bernoulli kept coming up.. A sign?

I almost brought one of those when they came out. How long did they sell for anyway?

Quite a short market life, probably two years, but the thing was reliable and extremely handy at the time but then nobody I knew had one so I had to lug the drive around lol

I had a zip drive....
It was repalced to a scsi Plextor cd-r later tho.

I used to hate SCSI and getting IRQ's properly setup, thank god PATA CD-R's came out quickly....
However i think i loved the speed of an SCSI more then PATA so i forced myself to love something i hate... sort of like my EX....

Same! My next "big media" set was an Adaptec SCSI controller and a Yamaha CRW4416 and it was well worth it because parallel burners would tend to underrun the buffer if you so much as looked at the computer wrong and wasted $15-20 blanks!

SCSI was a pain but for a little while it was the fastest interface available.

+1 I cant imagine how much of a pain setting up datacenters were back then lol now there's hoopla like S2D and VSAN, oh man. I would have killed for just an 8GB flash drive in those days!

 

[SKORPI0]

I had a zip drive....
It was repalced to a scsi Plextor cd-r later tho.

I used to hate SCSI and getting IRQ's properly setup, thank god PATA CD-R's came out quickly....
However i think i loved the speed of an SCSI more then PATA so i forced myself to love something i hate... sort of like my EX....

Paid about $650 for a HP SureStore (6020i) 2X CD-burner and the needed Adaptec SCSI controller (AHA-2930) Aug 1997. Blanks were about $4 each and since buffer under-run protection wasn't available yet, if burn failed, you end up with a coaster. I still have the burner and interface somewhere in storage.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/HP/C6020I/

 

[UsandThem]

I never went for the Zip drives. Instead, I chose the very "long" lived SuperDisk LS-120 drive.

I think by the time I spent 10 minutes installing the drive in my PC, it was already obsolete.

One of the worst component purchases I ever made. After buying that dud, I waited and when the slow CD burners (maybe 6X speed) dropped in price to $300, I picked one of those up.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I remember hearing of zip drives and was intrigued by them, but I heard about the click of death situation before I got around to looking at actually buying one. The idea of storing "almost 100 floppies" on a single cartridge sounded awesome at the time.

Crazy how far storage tech has come since those days though. Just look at how much data you can put on a micro SD card. I think they hit TB now, or at least they are close.

 

[GrumpyMan]

This brings back a lot of memories....

 

[JoeBleed]

I had the zip drive for 100 MB disks. it was the one that ran through the parallel port. I had windows 95 installed on a zip disk and could boot and run it from the 100 MB disk. I also had their tape drive DittoMax something or other. humm. still want a decent LTO drive now.

I still have a couple of old plextor cr-r scsi drives(in a box). I loved scsi. i don't understand why people had so much trouble understanding how to set up a scsi chain.

The LS 120 drives were neat because they could read 3.5" floppy disks as well. I didn't invest in them any though.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Castlewood Orb was too little, too late, but it was the King.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlewood_Orb_Drive

 

[dlerious]

Castlewood Orb was too little, too late, but it was the King.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlewood_Orb_Drive

That's the one I had. Don't recall now, but I had some problems - I think related to the cartridges.

 

[Fir]

All of the "flying head" drives were doomed out of the box.
This is why you don't take hard drives apart!
Yet every time you pulled a SyJet or Jaz cart, you were doing precisely that.
Interesting concept and unique, particularly the SyJet (1.5GB) and Jaz (1GB) which was enormous (removable) and fast at the time. (~ 20 years ago)

Nowadays you can get 4GB USB drives at expos for free.
And I'd be wary of using ANY drive just "laying around" because of this thing called the "USB Killer".

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I still have several Zip drives and Zip disks in storage, but I did get rid of several Iomega Jaz drives (their Winchester-tech drive) many years ago. I miss those days.

 

[hal2kilo]

Oh those new fangled Zip drives.

Somewhere, probably in a landfill, all my thesis data is resting on one of these.

OMG! Horrible, horrible, horrible. Drop an MBR in a heart beat. Betch ya never used or seen the original 5 Meggers, they were huge and sucked. Only a fool would use them for a backup device.