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SCSI zip drive

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
Oh, I thought you were talking about the 250 USB externals being cheap.
Those were a bit more expensive back than as well. IIRC the drives being the same. but for a controller board between SCSI and IDE. If the drive is bad, the controller ought to be fine, maybe try swapping boards with a Parallel Port version of the Mk.1 Zip?

 

Iesca

Well-known member
Here are some pics of the Zip100 Plus I just brought back from home. It has its own power adaptor, which I've included a closeup of.

Haven't tested it yet. Was very wary to try any of the disks from my parents' as I remember vividly the issues we had with the USB zip drive we had and the potential of ruining a good drive with a bad disk... So will be getting a never-used disk at some point!

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PB145B

Well-known member
Here are some pics of the Zip100 Plus I just brought back from home. It has its own power adaptor, which I've included a closeup of.

Haven't tested it yet. Was very wary to try any of the disks from my parents' as I remember vividly the issues we had with the USB zip drive we had and the potential of ruining a good drive with a bad disk... So will be getting a never-used disk at some point!

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Great find! The Plus drives ar great because they can do parallel or SCSI.

 

SE30_Neal

Well-known member
I’ve brought 35 disks off ebay and 6-7 didn’t work but thankfully didn’t damage either of my drives; 1 x zip 100 scsi and 1 x zip 100 plus like yours again on scsi. I had to re format all as they were old ibm etc but now have over 3GB’s worth of disks to back up my 3 vintage macs. Love the zip drive 

 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
I have a decent stack of 100MB ZIP disks for moving files on old rigs , they are cheap and reliable (my original 90's era disks still hold their old data).

 

EvieSigma

Young ThinkPad Apprentice
I've had 4 drives and sadly half of them were bad, but fortunately I still have a good parallel Zip100 and USB Zip250. Just need more disks and a SCSI Zip drive.

 

SE30_Neal

Well-known member
Same unknown I’ve found them reliable myself, i had a Zip drive back in the 1990’s and father was still using his zip drive for copying files as late as 2016 as his internet was so poor at home (he lives in the countryside). I’ve had my zip drives for 18 months now and couldn’t have got my se/30 up and running without them, i use my performa to access macintoshgarden (be it slowly) download to zip and transfer to my se/30, it’s not as good as networked but it works and is somehow satisfying hearing all the noises and blinking lights

 

Iesca

Well-known member
I had to re format all as they were old ibm etc but now have over 3GB’s worth of disks to back up my 3 vintage macs. Love the zip drive 
Yeah, I may go that route. People who have the Mac formatted ones seem to be charging extra for them, perhaps unsurprisingly. :/

 

EvieSigma

Young ThinkPad Apprentice
You might be better off getting an old PowerBook or iBook G4 with USB and a USB Zip drive and making disks that way...

 

EvieSigma

Young ThinkPad Apprentice
That's why I use the USB ones, and an old G4 PowerBook/iBook with OS X Tiger or Leopard can still format disks as HFS Standard for old Macs.

You can use a Power Mac G4 or G5 too but the laptops do have the advantage of being portable.

 

SE30_Neal

Well-known member
Yeah, I may go that route. People who have the Mac formatted ones seem to be charging extra for them, perhaps unsurprisingly. :/
Its worked for me lesca, it took a long time to get anything onto my se/30 and ended up buying the performa just to get online and transfer files, the zips have been a god send, now my se/30 is near where i want it backing up to zip so i could reinstall if i had a hhd failure is a must as it’s taken me 12-18 months to get this far

 

Iesca

Well-known member
Congratulations on your progress, Neal! It sounds like you have a hard drive in the SE/30 that's still working (for now!).

 
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SE30_Neal

Well-known member
Congratulations on your progress, Neal! It sounds like you have a hard drive in the SE/30 that's still working (for now!).
Yes kind of, my original 40mb drive was starting to fail and would stick a bit so I brought a later 1gb none quantum drive and installed 7.5.5 on it and hence me wanting to back up using zip (for now) installed a bunch of utilities, software and games as i have a gb to play with and it may sound stupid as its a 1 bit black and white machine with a tiny screen but I’m setting my se/30 up for desktop publishing. I’ve maxed the ram (128mb), i have a scsi scanner, apple 1200 printer, a wacom graphics tablet, photoshop, quark express, aldus freehand etc.. all for doing graphics, drawing and art. I did design at uni back in 1992 and used macs then and had a colour classic but always liked the little black and white machines so kinda nostalgic to attempt art on one now. I’m not a designer anymore I’m to much of a geek for that but do enjoy playing around with the software and making things especially of an old mac.

 
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Iesca

Well-known member
That sounds really cool. I'd like to get my Plus working 100% so I can use it as a glorified typewriter and some games. :)

 
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