zipdrives are obsolete

[cuteybunny]

why are they still selling it? link
It not only stores alot less then cdrom but also much more expensive per megs and is not as convenient as cdrom.

 

[Pepsi90919]

their selling point nowadays seems to be that "they're better than floppies" and "they don't scratch as much as CDs."

yeah, ok, nobody's used a floppy since 1994 as a means of transporting anything in a reliable fashion...

and CDs only scratch if you're retarded enough to ship the CD across the globe, bare, with postage stamps right on it.

CDs and CD-ROM drives are cheap as hell, and are soooo very commonplace, whereas you need a special drive and proprietary expensive disks for zip.

 

[spanky]

its not totally usless. its probably faster/easier to transfer certain things onto a zip disk than a cdr. for example...if i wanted to transfer a 10mb powepoint doc...obviously its not going to fit onto a floppy. so i would use a zip. i would not, however, want to open up a cd-burning program, and go thru the chore of making the image, and then burning the cd. know what i'm getting at?

 

[Pepsi90919]

<< i would not, however, want to open up a cd-burning program, and go thru the chore of making the image, and then burning the cd. know what i'm getting at? >>

OK, opening up the burning program takes ....5 seconds, burning the CD would take about 1-2 minutes then, making the image...what ???

 

[Zenmervolt]

For medium sized files (2-150mb) that do not need to be storred permanently, I don't think you can beat a ZIP. In college ZIP is invaluable as a means of transferring presentations when you don't want to waste a CD-R, or bother with all the time needed for a CD-RW. spanky summed it up nicely.

ZV

 

[JC]

I got a Zip100 for free, installed it in my box 'just in case' someone brought me something on a Zip disk....I've never used the drive, haven't even bought a disk for it. They're just
too expensive for their capacity. As far as burning CD-Rs, I don't find opening EZ-CD creator and burning a disk to be a chore, even with my 8x drive.

 

[SpongeBob]

Well, I would prefer to use CD-R's since they're way cheaper and hold a lot more, but the computers in the labs here at school don't have burners, so anything I do in the computer lab still requires use of the good ol' ZIP disk.

 

[Croton]

zip is good for graphic designers.

 

[ultimatebob]

Actually, Zip drives are still quite useful on the Mac platform. You can't even GET an internal floppy drive from Apple anymore, and Mac OS allows you to boot from Zip disks. With 100 (or 250) MB of space on a Zip, you can make a really cool system restore disk that will let you fix corrupted file systems or copy files off of the drive.

Besides, even floppy drives are useful for certain tasks on PC's. Things like making boot disks for BIOS updates and OS install/repair disks.

 

[MaxDSP]

<< For medium sized files (2-150mb) that do not need to be storred permanently, I don't think you can beat a ZIP. In college ZIP is invaluable as a means of transferring presentations when you don't want to waste a CD-R, or bother with all the time needed for a CD-RW. spanky summed it up nicely.

ZV >>



exactly, my school has zip drives on all their machines, so it makes it a whole lot easier to transfer files. I cant see CDR as a good choice for people like me. OK, you can burn your files and take them to school, but what if you need to edit them at school? Not a document you can save on a floppy, but a powerpoint presentation, graphics, visio drawings, etc? I specifically bought a zip drive to make it easier for me to have a fair amount of storage with me. Besides, unless you archive your disks away, you can always erase some of the files you dont need and reuse the disk. My drive is like a year old, but I only have 3 disks for it, which I bought for like $20. \

Not to mention the fact that I can use my school's fat pipeline to download files so I dont have to download them with my 56K at home

 

[ILikeSprite]

Zip drives are great. You cannot compare them to CDRs. You can copy, save, rename, delete, format, etc. with a zip disk. It's way more convienent then burning a cdr which you can only use once. Basically it's just a big floppy drive. I used to use it all the time before I had my wireless network. I used to copy like 20 mp3s from one computer to another then delete them off the zip disk and use it for something else.

 

[MaxDSP]

<< Zip drives are great. You cannot compare them to CDRs. You can copy, save, rename, delete, format, etc. with a zip disk. It's way more convienent then burning a cdr which you can only use once. Basically it's just a big floppy drive. I used to use it all the time before I had my wireless network. I used to copy like 20 mp3s from one computer to another then delete them off the zip disk and use it for something else. >>



another thing I forgot to add to my post. My zip250 drive is USB so I can easily copy files between my 2 computers. You would say that I should get off my ass and just connect the damn PC's together, but the old PC would cause more trouble than it's worth.

 

[Zenmervolt]

I almost forgot about another advantage of ZIPs, I use a 100MB disk to store all the files for the website I manage for my college's conservative paper. Because the ZIP is treated just like a normal drive, I can easily edit and move all the files of the site around when I update it, and since it's on ZIP and not on my HDD I won't lose it if I have to FFR for some reason.

ZV

 

[Hamburgerpimp]

They're great on your machine. For doing work on multiple machines, they suck. Not everyone has one.

 

[Linux23]

oh yes Zip drives are great...





great for losing your data. :|

 

[TallBill]

at my ex-school.. every student at the school gets a pc, and all of em had a zip250, and every pc in every lab had a zip250.. needless to say, they were VERY convenient if you didnt want to telnet into the server and store stuff on the schools computers (which was a pain in the ass and limited)

 

[spanky]

<< OK, opening up the burning program takes ....5 seconds, burning the CD would take about 1-2 minutes then, making the image...what ??? >>



making image....nero....cdrwin....clone cd.... u have to make images with those programs (i could be wrong). and i hate easy cd creator, so i won't go there. lets not forget that with a zip...u pop it in and drag & drop. ease of use is also a factor. when "putting" stuff on a cd...its not as simple. and like u said....burning a cd would take 1-2 minutes. i think saving to a zip would not take that long. i'm not saying the zip is almighty, but its still a pretty useful medium.

btw, for those who say its too expensive...no one is asking u got get like 50 zip discs. all u really need are a few. i use my zips for transferring data...like from my work pc to my home pc. after i get it copied, i take it off the zip. if i really wanted to have a backup, after i transferred the files from zip to my home pc, i would burn a cd.

 

[cuteybunny]

you guy are comparing it to floppy drive of course it is better but comparing to it usefulness to CDRW is a different matter. Good thing I bought a cd burner before I bought a zip drives, if I want to store document that don't requires more then a few hundred k bytes, a floppy will more then do it. Most computer have cdrom but no zip drives. Burning CD is actually quite easy once you get the hang of it, maybe all your zip users don't have any cd writer because you spend all your money on zip media alone
If you have to choose between a cdwriter and a zipdrives, i dunno why you would prefer zip. I would rather spend another 60-70 bucks for a new CD writer say 16x 10x 40x because then I can burn much faster then what I currently have as of now. I've also networked my computer for very little $$$ which I get 4mb/sec on a 10/100mbit lan so I can transfer huge amount of data back and forth so neither cdwriter or zip have any uses when it comes to this. The cdrw or zip is used to backup files, not transfer file between 2 computer as you have to write to the disk then put the disk in to the other computer therefore, inconvenient and slow.

 

[erub]

winxp supports drag and drop burning...time to upgrade

 

[spanky]

cuteybunny: i thought ur original topic stated that zips are obsolete? i don't think what we pro-zip people are trying to say is that the zip is better than the cdr(w). i have both a cd-rw and a zip. i got the cd-rw first, for the reasons you pointed out. then i began to notice the drawbacks of cd-rw's. many government and educations institution pc's have zips, rather than cd burners. so its not obsolete, and indeed very useful for many people. if you reread this thread carefully, you should realize that no one said the zip is better than the cd-rw.

 

[spanky]

<< winxp supports drag and drop burning...time to upgrade >>




thats a lite version of easy cd creator. like i said...i wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

 

[MaxDSP]

not to mention the durability factor. One lil scratch on a CDRW or CDR and it's done for.

 

[IGBT]

I installed zip drives on all 3 Athlon syst.along with CDR & DVD drives. I keep a syst.disk in the zip all the time. Great for non critical pic and text files. I like em.

 

[minendo]

i use my zip drive as a means of transferring data between my personal computer and campus computers since not all of our computers on campus have CDRW's or CDRs but all have zip disks

 

[Smbu]

Well, I don't think zip drives are obselete. They still have their uses. I have a scsi zip 100 drive and it is very versatile. I can connect it to the Adaptec 29160 U160 scsi card on my main system and then hook it up to my laptop using my Adaptec 1480 slimscsi pc card. Plus I just lent it out to my friend(with the pc card), so she could transfer some files to me from her laptop. It still has some uses, plus my school pretty much has zip drives on all the computers, so I can use the zip disks for moving larger files(compared to a floppy disk).

Now don't get me wrong, I use my Plextor 12/10/32 scsi cdrw drive a lot more than I'll ever use the zip drive (I just went through a 50pack of cdr's in about 2 weeks.:Q), but the zip drive still has some small uses. Plus I got it in trade in the FS/T forum, so it's not like I actually even paid for it.