Zip 100 external, parallel drive is very slow, please help.

[DavidinCincinnati]

I built a computer using an AMD 800 and ABIT KT7-Raid board. Once I got the system running I put my zip drive on the parallel port and it ran much slower than it did on my previous system. What am I doing wrong? I've changed the EPP, ECP and such in the BIOS setup and nothing improved. I also have the drivers installed properly. I would appreciate any advice.

 

[subhuman]

Yup, parallel ports are slow. But, USB is too (better though). Firewire, SCSI or USB2.0 are fast..

 

[themadmonk]

Had the external parallel once and it really ate into my processing, could see my stuff start to stutter, got the usb and no probs.

 

[jaywallen]

DavidinCincinnati,

Could you provide more information, please? It might be helpful to know a few things, among them:

1. Is this a Zip 100, Zip Plus, or Zip 250?
2. Which operating system are you using? If multi-boot, does the drive perform the same in all of those operating systems? Is this system running the same OS as the previous system on which the Zip drive worked better?
3. What other drives do you have installed on this system?
4. Just how slow is the drive?

I ran into an interesting phenomenon yesterday. A friend just got a Dell Dimension 4100. It's got the OEM image (FAT32) of Windows 2000 Professional SP1 on it. The processor is an 800+ MHz Pentium III. Besides a 7200 rpm 20 Meg Maxtor, the system has internal DVD-ROM and CD-ROM. She had saved her data to a bunch of Zip disks from her old system so that we could restore the data to the new one. After I completed the initial setup of the system, I powered down, added the parallel port Zip drive, and rebooted. Unlike every other Windows 2000 Pro system I've seen, the system didn't give any indication of having recognized the Zip drive!

All of the other W2K Pro systems I've seen were installed by me, NOT OEM images, and all of them recognized Zip drives immediately and used them correctly. I occasionally use a parallel port Zip drive with my Inspiron 7500 to give data to other people who use Zip drives. The Zip drive works faster under W2K than it did under Win98SE, which I used for about 6 months.

On my friend's Dimension 4100 I installed the latest Iomega drivers (not the whole software install, just the drivers) freshly downloaded from the Web site. Now the Device Manager does list the drive, but it takes Explorer almost 4 minutes just to list the drive contents. And in the meantime, the cursor won't move, and it's even damned difficult to get Task Manager to come up!!! When I looked in the driver properties I saw that the Write Cache enabled checkbox was grayed out. That's the only apparent difference between the driver as installed on her system and the driver as installed on my system. (I leave it unchecked anyway. Don't want to use write cache on a removable disk!)

If you see any similarities in our situations, you might post back with the information to see if we can figure something out.

Regards,
Jim

BTW, I tried various BIOS settings for the parallel port, also.

 

[yllus]

DavidinCincinnati, if you're speaking about the Zip 100 Drive, make sure you're also using the v5.51 drivers or later. They've actually been "fixed" to allow for much better speeds. I'm talking about a 4x improvement, not some little dinky times.

A quick link to iomega's FTP site:

ftp.iomega.com/english/