SomeGuy
Veteran Member
After some frustrating fiddling with a few Zip drives, just got me thinking about a few things.
The original Iomega Zip 100 drive was a fairly popular storage device. It was basically a successor to Iomega's much larger Bernoulli drive, it competed against the SuperDisk LS-120, and it could store much more than a regular floppy drive.
Much like a 3.5" floppy disk, they used a spinning magnetic disk enclosed in a plastic cartridge, with a small metal shutter that gave the drive access to to the disk surface. Hardly impervious to dust.
These disks and drives were fragile when they were new. I remember back when these were new, accidentally dropping a drive just a few feet on to a concrete floor - it looked fine but would no longer read disks. The drive heads are tiny and very easily ripped to shreds by dust, dirt, or damaged disks. Early internal units have a nice big silver sticker covering various openings, presumably to keep dust out. Don't even TOUCH a zip drive while it is reading a disk.
Disassembling a bad zip disk, I noticed that the adhesive that holds the magnetic "cookie" to the metal disk at the center seems to be degrading. Just like a 3.5" floppy disk, once that comes undone, it is game over.
The eject buttons often seemed to break. Of course these used electrical eject mechanisms, so it might choose not to let you eject the disk, but you would never know and just press the button harder. The early drives were really fun, as eject mechanism was too aggressive and would spit the disk completely out of the drive and on to the desk or floor.
Zip drives were criticized as slow or not "multimedia ready", but usually this was because people used the parallel port version a lot. USB 1.x was also rather slow. SCSI, however was blazing fast and efficient. IDE/ATAPI should have been fast, but I seem to recall those being a tad more sluggish than SCSI.
The interfaces that I recall:
SCSI Internal - can be used as a generic removable drive without any drivers, like Bernoulli, or hard drive if SCSI card bios supports it. Typically only SCSI drivers, so any OS that supports your SCSI card should be able to access the drive. Not sure about the other interfaces, but on SCSI you can use a cards low-level format option to wipe and re certify a disk. I don't know if it actually lays out any kind of low-level format or just wipes, but over the years I encountered multiple times where doing this would appear to fix some sector read errors.
SCSI External - Probably used more on Macs.
IDE Internal - No, not ATAPI, just IDE. This one was weird as the disk looked like an IDE hard disk drive. Without additional drivers, Windows would recognize it as a removable drive, and then fail to unmount the file system when ejected. From DOS, BIOS could access it without any drivers but it would have to be formatted with a partition table to use it without drivers. I'd guess an IDE to SATA adapter might let this work via SATA.
IDE ATAPI Internal - Does not try to look like a hard drive. I've tried one of these via an IDE to SATA adapter before and it did not work. I've read that an IDE to USB adapter should work. These were rather popular and pre-installed in some systems. Some BIOSes even included an option to boot from these drives.
USB - Should be recognized by any OS that supports USB and mass storage device. But the zip 100, I think only came with USB 1.1 speeds.
Parallel External - These were really popular as they were easy to add to laptops, or attach to random computers. But they were slow. For "vintage" purposes, the DOS software requires at least an NEC v20/v30/80186. I thought I had read once that someone had modified the Iomega provided drivers to work with 8088/8086 but I don't know what happened to that. There is a third party DOS drive that works with 8088/8086.
Personally, I think Iomega sort of shot themselves in the foot with the Zip 250. They had more capacity, and they could work with Zip 100 disks, but access to Zip 100 disks was much much slower.
There was also a 750mb version, that I believe supported firewire interfaces. This was followed up with the "Jazz" drive that as I recall used a completely sealed disk/head cartridge.
USB was the fancy new standard that was designed to accommodate all these different external (and sometimes even internal) removable media drive types.... until someone got the idea to put some flash ram right on a USB plug.
Trying to keep drives alive and happy has been a challenge. Most of these drives degrade after a while with some kind of intermittent seeking problem. It might load and mount a disk, and even succeed at a linear test of the entire disk (like SCSI bios read verification, Linux DD, or Norton Disk test) but then random seeks send it in to the "click of death". The best I have found to combat this is just to use something like Norton Disk Test to exercise the drive for a long period of time. If it is misbehaving like this, do NOT try to write data to the disk - it may render the disk unusable and unformatable.
I dare say most poorly stored zip disks, like you might find on eBeh, would be risky to use. Even floppy disks commonly have residue in them that can rip a disk apart and bork a drive's heads.
And when a drive misbehaves it may damage a formerly good disk that is then hazardous to try in another drive.
I've found that in a few cases, using a few drops of Isopropyl alcohol on the heads, and then letting the drive dry completely, can get a drive working again. In a few bad cases, an entire bath in Isopropyl alcohol. The only part of the drive that doesn't like that is the motor spindle bearings - the motor may get noisy. It looks like it should be possible to add oil/grease to the bearing but that does require disassembling the unit.
Looking at a few units, it seems the head/motor assembly is interchangeable with other interface units. So a SCSI board can be fitted with an assembly from an IDE drive. I don't know how many variations there are, but there are some. If trying to do that, compare the front bezel style for a similar one.
The head/motor assembly (I might be using the wrong term, it is sort of a "sled" that moves around in the drive as a disk is inserted and ejected). At the ones I looked at it is fairly easy to remove. Just push it back, and it pops out. Then undo some flat flex cables and the motor wire. The motor is easy to disassemble with just small Allen wrench and a small Phillips. The actual head is nightmare as there are a set of very strong permanent magnets holding the entire thing down. Fiddle with that and it will almost certainly damage the heads.
It has been fun accessing Zip drives from all kinds of OSes. Such as OS/2 or BeOS because they had drivers for the SCSI card. Zip drives were very common for a while, so they can still be found easily on eBay. But even as a vintage endeavor, I don't see zip drives as lasting much longer.
The original Iomega Zip 100 drive was a fairly popular storage device. It was basically a successor to Iomega's much larger Bernoulli drive, it competed against the SuperDisk LS-120, and it could store much more than a regular floppy drive.
Much like a 3.5" floppy disk, they used a spinning magnetic disk enclosed in a plastic cartridge, with a small metal shutter that gave the drive access to to the disk surface. Hardly impervious to dust.
These disks and drives were fragile when they were new. I remember back when these were new, accidentally dropping a drive just a few feet on to a concrete floor - it looked fine but would no longer read disks. The drive heads are tiny and very easily ripped to shreds by dust, dirt, or damaged disks. Early internal units have a nice big silver sticker covering various openings, presumably to keep dust out. Don't even TOUCH a zip drive while it is reading a disk.
Disassembling a bad zip disk, I noticed that the adhesive that holds the magnetic "cookie" to the metal disk at the center seems to be degrading. Just like a 3.5" floppy disk, once that comes undone, it is game over.
The eject buttons often seemed to break. Of course these used electrical eject mechanisms, so it might choose not to let you eject the disk, but you would never know and just press the button harder. The early drives were really fun, as eject mechanism was too aggressive and would spit the disk completely out of the drive and on to the desk or floor.
Zip drives were criticized as slow or not "multimedia ready", but usually this was because people used the parallel port version a lot. USB 1.x was also rather slow. SCSI, however was blazing fast and efficient. IDE/ATAPI should have been fast, but I seem to recall those being a tad more sluggish than SCSI.
The interfaces that I recall:
SCSI Internal - can be used as a generic removable drive without any drivers, like Bernoulli, or hard drive if SCSI card bios supports it. Typically only SCSI drivers, so any OS that supports your SCSI card should be able to access the drive. Not sure about the other interfaces, but on SCSI you can use a cards low-level format option to wipe and re certify a disk. I don't know if it actually lays out any kind of low-level format or just wipes, but over the years I encountered multiple times where doing this would appear to fix some sector read errors.
SCSI External - Probably used more on Macs.
IDE Internal - No, not ATAPI, just IDE. This one was weird as the disk looked like an IDE hard disk drive. Without additional drivers, Windows would recognize it as a removable drive, and then fail to unmount the file system when ejected. From DOS, BIOS could access it without any drivers but it would have to be formatted with a partition table to use it without drivers. I'd guess an IDE to SATA adapter might let this work via SATA.
IDE ATAPI Internal - Does not try to look like a hard drive. I've tried one of these via an IDE to SATA adapter before and it did not work. I've read that an IDE to USB adapter should work. These were rather popular and pre-installed in some systems. Some BIOSes even included an option to boot from these drives.
USB - Should be recognized by any OS that supports USB and mass storage device. But the zip 100, I think only came with USB 1.1 speeds.
Parallel External - These were really popular as they were easy to add to laptops, or attach to random computers. But they were slow. For "vintage" purposes, the DOS software requires at least an NEC v20/v30/80186. I thought I had read once that someone had modified the Iomega provided drivers to work with 8088/8086 but I don't know what happened to that. There is a third party DOS drive that works with 8088/8086.
Personally, I think Iomega sort of shot themselves in the foot with the Zip 250. They had more capacity, and they could work with Zip 100 disks, but access to Zip 100 disks was much much slower.
There was also a 750mb version, that I believe supported firewire interfaces. This was followed up with the "Jazz" drive that as I recall used a completely sealed disk/head cartridge.
USB was the fancy new standard that was designed to accommodate all these different external (and sometimes even internal) removable media drive types.... until someone got the idea to put some flash ram right on a USB plug.
Trying to keep drives alive and happy has been a challenge. Most of these drives degrade after a while with some kind of intermittent seeking problem. It might load and mount a disk, and even succeed at a linear test of the entire disk (like SCSI bios read verification, Linux DD, or Norton Disk test) but then random seeks send it in to the "click of death". The best I have found to combat this is just to use something like Norton Disk Test to exercise the drive for a long period of time. If it is misbehaving like this, do NOT try to write data to the disk - it may render the disk unusable and unformatable.
I dare say most poorly stored zip disks, like you might find on eBeh, would be risky to use. Even floppy disks commonly have residue in them that can rip a disk apart and bork a drive's heads.
And when a drive misbehaves it may damage a formerly good disk that is then hazardous to try in another drive.
I've found that in a few cases, using a few drops of Isopropyl alcohol on the heads, and then letting the drive dry completely, can get a drive working again. In a few bad cases, an entire bath in Isopropyl alcohol. The only part of the drive that doesn't like that is the motor spindle bearings - the motor may get noisy. It looks like it should be possible to add oil/grease to the bearing but that does require disassembling the unit.
Looking at a few units, it seems the head/motor assembly is interchangeable with other interface units. So a SCSI board can be fitted with an assembly from an IDE drive. I don't know how many variations there are, but there are some. If trying to do that, compare the front bezel style for a similar one.
The head/motor assembly (I might be using the wrong term, it is sort of a "sled" that moves around in the drive as a disk is inserted and ejected). At the ones I looked at it is fairly easy to remove. Just push it back, and it pops out. Then undo some flat flex cables and the motor wire. The motor is easy to disassemble with just small Allen wrench and a small Phillips. The actual head is nightmare as there are a set of very strong permanent magnets holding the entire thing down. Fiddle with that and it will almost certainly damage the heads.
It has been fun accessing Zip drives from all kinds of OSes. Such as OS/2 or BeOS because they had drivers for the SCSI card. Zip drives were very common for a while, so they can still be found easily on eBay. But even as a vintage endeavor, I don't see zip drives as lasting much longer.