So, I got this. But I also know these things aren’t the most reliable and I am really paranoid about breaking it, and there’s some suspicious things.
First, it feels cheap, especially the USB port on the back feels like it wants to break off.
Second, and quite worrying, when I first got it, it was clicking and not reading disks. Slower when I held it with the opening towards the top, faster with opening towards bottom. I thought it was dead, when eventually after a few retries it started working. Now, this was faster clicking, especially fast shortly before it started working, so perhaps it was just stuck.
On the other hand, I found this: www.grc.com/tip/codfaq2.htm
Most users who have lost their crucial data tell the same sad story of hearing “those clicks” some time ago “but then they went away and everything seemed okay for a while.”
Now, 2 of the disks also had some smaller issues. One had trouble loading. Formatting it seems to have fixed the issue. Maybe. I used fdisk so it left out the first 1MB.
The second loads fine, but doesn’t seem to like writing. It seems to do it in bursts, and it is audible. There’s also 2 sections where it produces a buzz, both on read and write.
Here’s an audio sample from continuous (one file) write to that disk:
Image
files.catbox.moe/yo6g50.flac
Current ideas
Checking disks for damages by pulling back the metal cover and rotating the disk manually, looking for stuff like this: www.grc.com/tip/codfaq4.htm or anything suspicious (the white cloth inside is too close and hairy for my liking).
Peeking into the drive to check for head damage and dirt.
Treating it like I treat running HDDs (do not unpower without parked heads, avoiding movement and vibrations), and generally being careful even when off (avoiding drops).
sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s a simple test really. Have you ever considered thinking about having a inclination to plug the drive in? Well it’s probably broke now.
In all seriousness, I used Zip and Jazz drives professionally back in the early '00s. And gods above and below we lost so many hours of work to them just crapping out. We used them for system imaging. We were building out bespoke servers and workstations for physical access control systems. We stored golden images on zip discs and would image completed systems to send to the customers along with their systems. We created those images on other zip discs before taking them to the one system with a cd/dvd burner. We chewed through so many zip discs it was crazy.
I finally setup the dvd burning station on a cart so it could be wheeled over to customer systems. It provided a PXE server to boot from and images to both load the golden image over a network switch and image the competed systems. The savings in time and dead zip discs was huge.
I get playing with those things for nostalgia. But the only thing they could be relied upon to do was die.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 day ago
Wow, who ever though zip was a good idea for this? Lol. Well, you gained a lot of experience.
We were using cd’s in the mid/late 90’s for imaging already.