I use 250MB USB in my main machine and 100Mb ATAPI in my 486 for transfers. 486 is stationned in a different room so LAN is not a good idea. ZIP drives are fast enough for the amounts of data I work with.

Whenever Windows 7 starts and there's someone else in my room, they start asking silly questionns as ZIP250 initialises and makes noises 😀

Btw, anyone noticed that ZIP drives are way slower under 7 than under OS/2?

I have an ATAPI internal one in my MMX PC and an external parallel one on top of my XP box (both 250MB units), and used them for data transfer in DOS mode in the past. But after having a 3.5" CF to IDE adapter in my MMX PC, I'm not using them anymore. they look cool though, just like the Hayes external modem which is still connected to my main rig (core2 quad - windows 7)...🤣

philscomputerlab wrote:

What are the going rates for ZIP drives? What drive would you go for? 100, 250 or 750? USB on the desktop and parallel on the retro PC?

For the price just check ebay, in Germany they often seem to go for minimum bid.
Re capacity: I'd look what's available, both drives (different connections) and disks. It's probably best to use same capacity drives and disks since there are some restrictions in compatibility.
Definitely read the Wikipedia article on the Zip drive. Some quotes:
"Higher-capacity Zip disks must be used in a drive with at least the same capacity ability. Higher-capacity drives can read lower-capacity media. The 250 MB drive writes much more slowly to 100 MB disks than the 100 MB drive, and the Iomega software is unable to perform a "long" (thorough) format on a 100 MB disk. ... The 750 MB drive cannot write to 100 MB disks but can read existing disks."
"Zip drives are still used today by retro-computing enthusiasts as a means to transfer large amounts (compared to the retro hardware) of data between modern and older computer systems. The Commodore-Amiga, Atari ST, Apple II, and "old world" Macintosh communities often use drives with the SCSI interface prevalent on those platforms."

Speed is not too high (for the 100MB version, don't know about the later ones) so even USB 1.1 is not a bottleneck. Parallel port can be a bottleneck depending on features (ECP/EPP), if you don't have too many systems you want to use a Zip drive with you might prefer the internal ATAPI ones. There is no need to use a Zip drive on a machine with USB today.
If you already established procedures for data transfer to your older boxes there is no real need to try Zip drives as well.

LS-120 is also nice regarding its feature to use normal 1.44MB floppies (IIRC faster than normal floppy drives and better error correction/tolerance), but it seems that external versions are less common, I don't know if there even is a USB version.

Thank you for your detailed answer idspispopd! For a 386 it would be nice but to be honest shutting the machine down and putting the CF card in my USB reader is a very fast process already. Might just stick with what works for me.

I bought a paralell 100mb unit costing 16 Euro + 5 Euro shipping last week. But it was boxed with the original driver disk and the package also included 11 100mb disks.
I was mostly after the power brick, the original install floppy and the disks, the unit it self often sell for less than 5 Euro here in Sweden.

I have never touched nor even seen a real ZIP drive. I am unsure how they work in terms of usability.

I had a thought that they were merely glorified Floppy discs. However on reading this topic, I understand that they are simply an alternative to DAT tapes? And can only really be used for reel to reel type data acces??? 😕

Blurredman wrote:

I have never touched nor even seen a real ZIP drive. I am unsure how they work in terms of usability.

I had a thought that they were merely glorified Floppy discs. However on reading this topic, I understand that they are simply an alternative to DAT tapes? And can only really be used for reel to reel type data acces??? 😕

really? I can't go to a goodwill without practically tripping over one. At least the external models. The internal drives are a bit uncommon in the wild but certainly not rare. Eh, I won't pretend to know how they work but they do basicly function like a high capacity floppy disk. They even look like sorta fat 3 1/2 disks.

soviet conscript wrote:

Blurredman wrote:

I have never touched nor even seen a real ZIP drive. I am unsure how they work in terms of usability.

I had a thought that they were merely glorified Floppy discs. However on reading this topic, I understand that they are simply an alternative to DAT tapes? And can only really be used for reel to reel type data acces??? 😕

really? I can't go to a goodwill without practically tripping over one. At least the external models. The internal drives are a bit uncommon in the wild but certainly not rare. Eh, I won't pretend to know how they work but they do basicly function like a high capacity floppy disk. They even look like sorta fat 3 1/2 disks.

In Britain, we don't have such amazing places like Goodwill et al. Unfortunately. I have a few charity shops in my area, but they're only small high street premesis's, and the stock they hold is merely alot of clothes and antique stuff. 😢 😢

Blurredman wrote:

In Britain, we don't have such amazing places like Goodwill et al. Unfortunately. I have a few charity shops in my area, but they're only small high street premesis's, and the stock they hold is merely alot of clothes and antique stuff. 😢 😢

Same with OZ, most of the thrift stores seem to be full of clothes and random bits of kitchen ware. I didn't realise there were USB ZIP drives! Mmmm more junk to add to my collection. I kinda like the idea of transferring files via Zip disk. I'm going to assume there ZIP drives work in DOS?

dacow wrote:

Blurredman wrote:

In Britain, we don't have such amazing places like Goodwill et al. Unfortunately. I have a few charity shops in my area, but they're only small high street premesis's, and the stock they hold is merely alot of clothes and antique stuff. 😢 😢

Same with OZ, most of the thrift stores seem to be full of clothes and random bits of kitchen ware. I didn't realise there were USB ZIP drives! Mmmm more junk to add to my collection. I kinda like the idea of transferring files via Zip disk. I'm going to assume there ZIP drives work in DOS?

yes they will. I've used an external parallel port version on a v20 system running dos 3.3 before. Works in dos 5 and 6 no problem. All you need is to run the driver guest.exe for the external drives. Process may be slightly diffrent with internal IDE version in dos. I know for the SCSI ones the SCSI controller needs to "see" the drive before guest.exe will work.you can get it to load on boot but that takes memory so I usually just activate it when I need to use it. Guest.exe will search for the drive in dos and assign it a letter.

Blurredman wrote:

I have never touched nor even seen a real ZIP drive. I am unsure how they work in terms of usability.

I had a thought that they were merely glorified Floppy discs. However on reading this topic, I understand that they are simply an alternative to DAT tapes? And can only really be used for reel to reel type data acces??? 😕

Usability - well, I found it very convenient. I don't know why you refer to DAT tapes and reel to reel - when the driver is installed you use them just like floppy drives.
Glorified - basically they are floppy drives, but with much higher capacity which was adequate at the time (of course today 100MB is not much, but still far from 1.44MB) and with matching speed (not terribly fast, somewhere between 500kB/s and 1MB/s).

Parallel ZIP is super convenient I agree. Just load GUEST and you're set.

Anyone else find it funny that the a pile of IOMega Zip disks were apparently supposed to have survived for 1o years in an moist/dirty ruined nuclear lab in the recent Godzilla movie. Or that others were able to read from them, even if they had survived. I got a real kick out of it.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Parallel ZIP is super convenient I agree. Just load GUEST and you're set.

Yhea, and thankfully Epson made some external drives that come in a white case that actually matches virtually every PC case from the 90's rather then that horrid bluish most drives are. The internal drives with the purple faceplates especially baffle me. I ended up painting mine white.

kolano wrote:

Anyone else find it funny that the a pile of IOMega Zip disks were apparently supposed to have survived for 1o years in an moist/dirty ruined nuclear lab in the recent Godzilla movie. Or that others were able to read from them, even if they had survived. I got a real kick out of it.

yhea, I was thinking that same thing.

kolano wrote:

Anyone else find it funny that the a pile of IOMega Zip disks were apparently supposed to have survived for 1o years in an moist/dirty ruined nuclear lab in the recent Godzilla movie. Or that others were able to read from them, even if they had survived. I got a real kick out of it.

Yes that was pretty cool indeed 😀

I like when they use old hardware in movies.

idspispopd wrote:

I had a thought that they were merely glorified Floppy discs. However on reading this topic, I understand that they are simply an alternative to DAT tapes? And can only really be used for reel to reel type data acces??? 😕

It was just the way it was talked about on the topic, made me think it was a 'write in bulk' type system where you could only save files in the form of windows backup files or w/e.

Now I have been informed properly 😎 I would love a ZIP drive, a couple, one in each (worthwhile) PC. But having a home network negates the need.

I didn't see a real ZIP drives, but one of my friend who entered college in desigh course, he should report his Photoshop and 3D studio works.
He used HDD rack and a HDD so he submit his rack to professors or upload to FTP. (We,thug,used HDD racks for sharing games, softwares and nudity. 🤣 )
But it maybe harder to girls use HDD thing. And some girl students bought "VERY EXPENSIVE" external SCSI ZIP drives!!! Of course, they were replaced with USB memory stick a few year later.
What my friend surprised is he recently visited one of those girl's house and found those drive and disks. And the girl could not experience any SCSI interface(no way to plug it) outer college, she just hold on over 15 years...

Ah, My interest is LS-240 which could initialize 1.44 floppy to 32MB. But they are hard to find.

ik777 wrote:

I didn't see a real ZIP drives, but one of my friend who entered college in desigh course, he should report his Photoshop and 3D […]
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I didn't see a real ZIP drives, but one of my friend who entered college in desigh course, he should report his Photoshop and 3D studio works.
He used HDD rack and a HDD so he submit his rack to professors or upload to FTP. (We,thug,used HDD racks for sharing games, softwares and nudity. 🤣 )
But it maybe harder to girls use HDD thing. And some girl students bought "VERY EXPENSIVE" external SCSI ZIP drives!!! Of course, they were replaced with USB memory stick a few year later.
What my friend surprised is he recently visited one of those girl's house and found those drive and disks. And the girl could not experience any SCSI interface(no way to plug it) outer college, she just hold on over 15 years...

Ah, My interest is LS-240 which could initialize 1.44 floppy to 32MB. But they are hard to find.

I never seen any LS-240 for sale (when I was looking at least 😜 ) nor did I ever see one in a dumpsterfind/fleamarket/second hand shop.
The external LS-120's are also not very common. Shame really, I only have a couple of those older LS-120's that won't work with XP iirc.

My most 2 miss retro thing in flea market.
1. $9 Imation Superdisk LS-240 last year. ㅠㅠ
2. $35 Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro last month. ㅠㅡ

actually I went into a local thrift chain here today and first thing I saw in the electronics section was a NOS parallel external ZIP drive. everything inside it was still sealed. $2