Comment on How do I not kill my Iomega ZIP drive I just got? (The experiences I've heard of scare me)
rozodru@pie.andmc.ca 1 day ago
in the late 90s/early 00s I went through a few of these drives. OP, they break, they just die. once you start getting the “clicks of death” it’s only a matter of time before the entire drive craps out on you. it generally doesn’t happen all at once. few clicks here and there. but eventually it’ll become more frequent until every zip disk you pop in just starts clicking. Just how it goes. and the thing is they’re pretty much impossible to fix. when it’s dead, it’s dead.
All I can suggest is enjoy it while you can because it WILL die and the fact the thing has lasted this long is impressive.
Eventually after the 4th drive died my Dad was done with them, had enough. Spent the money to get a CD-RW drive.
So they’re great for nostalgia. they’re neat in that regard. but don’t put anything you would consider even moderately important on those zip disks.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
I wish I could see into the drive when it was clicking to see what exactly was happening, whether it was seek issue, or the head arm was just stuck (and not even entering the disk). It should have been functional before shipping. And also, I let it warm up for an hour, but there was some condensation after bringing it in on it, and I don’t know how it was doing inside, though I think it should have been okay after that much time on table.
Anyway, as for the problematic disk, Iomegaware’s full format manages to take care of it, but it’s far slower than writing the whole disk.
It also shows disk and “formatting” life percentage, whatever those actually mean. I couldn’t get Trouble in Paradise to work in either Windows XP or 2000, though I didn’t try on bare metal.