ZIP drives on Windows 10/11?

[TH2002]

(Apologies if someone has asked this before, I looked and could not find a thread in this vein)

In another trip to the thrift store this past Saturday I picked up a couple Zip 100 drives, figuring they would be a great way to transfer data between my vintage and modern computers.

One of the drives I picked up is a Z100P2 parallel port model. So far I've tested the drive on MS-DOS 4.01, 6.2, as well as Windows 95 and XP - works like a dream.

But what about using these older drives on Windows 10 and 11? Would it be feasible to use one of those USB to parallel adapters, or should I pick up one of the never Zip drives that has USB built in? Do modern versions of Windows have problems recognizing even those? What about how reliable these drives are in comparison to regular floppy drives - better or worse?

 

[krebizfan]

No Zip drive with the parallel port works with Windows 10. Okay, in theory, one could write a driver for it but there isn't one out there. The USB converters won't pass the correct signals to a parallel port drive.

Later USB drives will work under Win10. The earliest old blue case USB Zip drive didn't when I tried it.

Reliability: The early parallel port drives and their IDE and SCSI counterparts were good. Somewhat better than floppy drives. The end of the run with the small USB drives were okay, not as good as the earliest models but still could be counted on. Somewhere between the two was the click of death heavy run where Iomega's listed number of failed drives sent in for returns was about 25% of what shipped at the time. Sadly, the Zip drive was the best of the super floppies with only the very expensive Bernoulli and older Syquest models being better.

Have fun with it. Don't rely on it. Don't take a failed disk to a different drive without careful examination. The click of death resulted in some disks being torn which destroyed the next drive it was inserted into. The drive damage would also tear other disks. Iomega included instructions with post click of death drives on how to find and prevent contagious death.

Click of death was a normal factor with the Zip drive. If the drive had a problem reading the disk, it would retract (which made a click noise) and run the head over a small cleaning pad. That usually removed the containments and kept the drive running. Eventually, the pad would become too dirty and the drive would just click repeatedly before putting up an error. The bad period of contagious click of death involved brand new drives and brand new disks which made it somewhat amazing that the Zip drive was able to continue after that.

 

[TH2002]

No Zip drive with the parallel port works with Windows 10. Okay, in theory, one could write a driver for it but there isn't one out there. The USB converters won't pass the correct signals to a parallel port drive.

Later USB drives will work under Win10. The earliest old blue case USB Zip drive didn't when I tried it.

Reliability: The early parallel port drives and their IDE and SCSI counterparts were good. Somewhat better than floppy drives. The end of the run with the small USB drives were okay, not as good as the earliest models but still could be counted on. Somewhere between the two was the click of death heavy run where Iomega's listed number of failed drives sent in for returns was about 25% of what shipped at the time. Sadly, the Zip drive was the best of the super floppies with only the very expensive Bernoulli and older Syquest models being better.

Have fun with it. Don't rely on it. Don't take a failed disk to a different drive without careful examination. The click of death resulted in some disks being torn which destroyed the next drive it was inserted into. The drive damage would also tear other disks. Iomega included instructions with post click of death drives on how to find and prevent contagious death.

Click of death was a normal factor with the Zip drive. If the drive had a problem reading the disk, it would retract (which made a click noise) and run the head over a small cleaning pad. That usually removed the containments and kept the drive running. Eventually, the pad would become too dirty and the drive would just click repeatedly before putting up an error. The bad period of contagious click of death involved brand new drives and brand new disks which made it somewhat amazing that the Zip drive was able to continue after that.

Are you referring to the Z100USB as the one that doesn't work with Windows 10?

As much as I'd love to just use Windows XP or 7 as my day-to-day OS, such becomes more impractical with each passing day and even W10 will be out of support by the end of next year - I'll probably hold on to it for a few more years past its EOL but now I'm getting ahead of myself...

I've seen mixed results among people attempting to fix the 'click of death' - fortunately that hasn't happened to my drive yet, but since I've only had it for a couple of days I don't want to celebrate too early.

 

[krebizfan]

The drive that failed was a USB Zip 100 in the same bulky plastic shell with external power brick that the early parallel and SCSI models used. I have a slimmer USB Zip 100 that worked well with WIn10. I think that has to do with when the USB mass storage drivers came out. The good news is USB mass storage became widespread after Iomega resolved most of click of death issues so drives made in 99 through the end in 03 should have a good chance of working. One minor issue is that the Zip drive is a USB 1 device; it may not work with USB 3 ports. I recommend plugging into a USB 2 port if possible.

I admit I am more used to the Zip drive being a method to transfer files between older and new systems than as a storage medium in its own right. With a modern system, the Zip drive is just so slow and has such a limited capacity as to be not very useful.

If I remember the click of death dates correctly, the first major reports were early in 1998 so drives manufactured in 97 or 98 should be treated with more caution than the earlier or later drives.