Does IBM make better Zip drives than Iomega?

[Noriaki]

Hmm
Looking at 250MB Zip drives, canada.buy.com has one made by IBM for $50 more (canadian) than the one at Onvia.ca made by Iomega.

Is the IBM one better or are you just paying for name?

 

[Vegito]

I thought they're all from iomega and ur paying for the price...

 

[BurnItDwn]

havent zip drives been obselete since hmmm ... hard drives were bigger then 2GB ???
or maybe since CDRs hit the mass market (Beginning of 98) ???

If you really want one .. the IBMs and the IOmegas are the same

I remember my zip drive from way back when... it was external Parallel port device ... 100mb ... and it took 40 minutes to write 100mb to it ..

i finally got rid of that thing last year ... after it had collected dust for about 2 years ...

 

[Celstar]

I still find zip drives useful.

 

[Viper GTS]

ZIP drives are still very useful. My college uses ZIP drives as removable storage in their computer labs, for instance. And it does NOT take 40 minutes to read 100 MB from a ZIP drive. Maybe the parallel port version, but the ATAPI models are fast, reliable, & easy removable mass storage.

Viper GTS

 

[jamarno]

Sometimes IBM gets the better ones. Example: a few years before the turn of the century, Seagate shipped some hard drives labelled "IBM REJECT." They worked fine but not fine enough for IBM.

 

[DesignDawg]

ZIP drives can be VERY useful. Graphic designers use them like they're the greatest thing ever invented. And why not? They hold enough to quickly dump something off onto the disk, take it across the hall, home, wherever, without having to sit and wait to burn a CD or anything. I personally have 2.

Ricky
DesignDawg

 

[dcdomain]

I find them to be a necessary evil. Back when they were first released, they were awesome. But these days, they are a little slow, even the internal ones. It's just that they've been around for so long that they are pretty much the standard in alternative file sharing. All the clusters in my school uses zip too. Wish it was the Castlewood Orb's they were using instead... only reason I still have my zip drive is because of the campus clusters. But most of the time, I find myself ftping the files instead...

 

[jeans2nd]

My understanding was all Zip stuff (cartridges included) were made by Iomega. I have 4 - 2-100's, 2-250's - all external parallel port. THey are slow, but very necessary where I work. The only problem I've had is Click Death, but I've returned 2 to Iomega for this and they've replaced them free, no hassles. See Steve Gibson's COD/Zip site - Steve Gibson COD

 

[Davegod75]

i got one but i never use it. look for a FS post soon.

 

[Pakman]

OMG, my Zip drive clicks!!! I never used a Zip drive, but I got this one from a buddy of mine so I decided to try it. It worked for awhile then it started clicking and I couldn't get it to read any Zip disks. I was about to remove it and trash it! Will Iomega replace it for free even if it's out of warranty and OEM from a Compaq machine? I just checked out Steve's site and it seems to be a common problem.

 

[Noriaki]

Well I plan to buy it for $62 from the FS/T forums....that's not much really. It's an internal IDE Zip250 I just saw that some were labelled IBM and some Iomega when I was looking at what they cost other places.

I want it for several reasons:
1) My University has them, but no CD writers. I could use a CDR at home but I couldn't change it's contents at school, so I've been stuck with floppies. You wanna talk obselete...

2) A few people use them, and come over to use to my CDRW at times (they pay me), but he has an external parallel port model...DAMN that thing is slow.

3) I like to keep up to date drivers all in one place, and a CDRW is kind of annoying for it...my CDRW drive writes at 8x but even still that's not terribly fast when you have to erase and rewrite the whole disc not to mention copying the conents to a hard drive first...and I find PacketCDs to be more hassle than they are worth....

I've considered this long and hard and I'm certainly not replacing my CDRW drive with a Zip drive, I'll have both. But I think that a Zip Drive would be quite useful. If you don't that's fine, we are all entitled to our opinions. I certainly wouldn't use one of those horridly slow Parallel ones, or the expensive and slow USB ones...just the IDEs (or SCSI but I don't have).