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iomega zip drives in general...

chelseayr

Well-known member
just a lump of a few small questions related to the same family of drives...

I presume the 'modern' (translucent shell instead of the solid chunky-box shell one) external 250mb model is only for either usb or usb/parallel correct? as it seem some web sources are mistakening the non-usb port for scsi but from what I can tell so far iomega never had made a scsi/usb combo

with that in mind I assume that the ide ones are always atapi mode so one in theory could use the acard 7720 bridge (these sometimes go for cheap only because it can't handle hdds from what I can see) to get a 250mb drive onto non-usb systems? that is if just going to 100mb drives instead wasn't an option

and mm I know its not related to iomega but does anyone here maybe know if the vst drives were custom-made or are just standard iomega internal drives inside the 'artful' vst shells themselves? just curious about this one is all :)
 

bibilit

Well-known member
Translucent are USB only. The blue plastic ones are either scsi or parallel, identical except for cable and circuitry (parallel are far more common)

From the outside, the only way to tell if you are dealing with one or another is to have a look at the backside of the drive, if two switches are present (for termination and id number) the drive is scsi, if not parallel.
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
From the outside, the only way to tell if you are dealing with one or another is to have a look at the backside of the drive, if two switches are present (for termination and id number) the drive is scsi, if not parallel.

Mine are a little more talkative than that: my scsi one has a little scsi icon above the ports, and the parallel one has a little printer icon over one of them.
 

chelseayr

Well-known member
cheesestraws, well this one;
has no logo which was why I had wanted to recheck that it wasn't just me as I think that officially it was only usb or usb/parallel and web people just are confused indeed :-s (and like bibilit said re somewhere to set the scsi id as well)
 

bibilit

Well-known member
Yes also both icons for Scsi or Printer for parallel.

But switches are the more obvious way to got it right, ports can be confusing and unfortunately there’s no marking on the faceplate.

There was another model, the Plus. Was made to cope scsi and parallel with a special cable.

Was pretty slow and unreliable.
 

Juror22

Well-known member
This is very timely, I was just going through a box of zip drives/disks and wanted to know which (if any) would be of use with my Macs vs my old PC's. Thanks for the quick easy way to separate them out.
 

Juror22

Well-known member
Quick Tally:
3 SCSI 100
2 Parallel 100
1 USB 250
2 internal IDE (ATAPI? not sure how to check for that - according to LEM, there were some that were one and not the other)
LEM - see interfaces
I will have to see which ones are still working, since everything has been in storage for a while.
 

aladds

Well-known member
cheesestraws, well this one;

Pretty certain that connector, which looks a bit like SCSI 2, is actually used for firewire and PCMCIA adaptors - this could certainly lead to some confusion.

edit: like this

Also the first external "ice blue" Zip 100 drives had what I beleive was an IDE interface visible (but unpopulated) inside the case
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
@aladds is correct: I have had one of these drives since it was new, and that extra SCSI-like port is to connect the FireWire adapter on the back. I have one.
 

chelseayr

Well-known member
thanks, interesting to know that iomega made two different kind of firewire adapters (the scsi-bridging one for the jaz drive and apparently also this other kind for the zip drive)

don't mind if I quietly ask this again only because I'm still curious. the zip drive shows up as an atapi device does not it? (just wondering in term of using it with a bridge adapter that only can handle atapi-type drives)
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
Here is a good online photo of the drive with the FW adapter attached:

41XN65HWX9L.jpg
 

chelseayr

Well-known member
don't mind me asking one more minor question under this topic .. assumed one was buying 'unknown' used media, can you tell if it had been botched by a bad drive? I know theres a lot of unopened medias on ebay/etc but just had to wonder about this nevertheless
 
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