smrieck511
Well-known member
As the main startup drive for my SE/30....Seems very quiet and reliable. How's the speed? Anyone wanna talk me out of this before i go through the hassle of formatting it and installing it etc.... ?
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What are the disadvantages of a Jaz drive as system boot ?
- Thread starter smrieck511
- Start date
smrieck511
Well-known member
Will it auto-eject inside the case?
Classic Mac
Well-known member
I use jaz disks to back up my files. If I remember right it is about 15MB per second with a scsi II. It will boot my 520c fine.
smrieck511
Well-known member
Thanks for the info guys. I'm gonna try it. I've been annoyed by the noise of my Seagate HD... I found the Jaz drive in my parts box the other day and had one of those "hey, I wonder if..." moments.
smrieck511
Well-known member
Seems to boot fast and run great but it's auto-ejecting on shutdown which I expected...oh well.
techknight
Well-known member
You know, thats strange, as i run a jaz setup on my SE/30 and with one system it will auto-eject. But with system 7.1 with no Jaz drivers, it doesnt auto-eject.
smrieck511
Well-known member
Yep..system 6.0.8 formatted with Lido. Auto ejects every time. I really like running system 6 on this one so I guess I'll just deal with a noisy HD
protocol7
Well-known member
I had a couple of A/UX installs on zip disks here when I was playing with my SE/30. I don't remember them auto-ejecting on shutdown. It may be a driver setting or it may not work if the zip disks are formatted using HD SC Setup as they'll be seen by the ROM as hard disks rather than removable devices. I'm guessing Jaz disks work the same way.
The internal zip drive on my G3 used to auto eject.
However, if it is an external iomega drive, I expect it to function the same as my parallel zip drive which has an eject button, and possibly send an interrupt to the system to tell it that the disk has been ejected, such that it can be removed from the desktop UI.
However, if it is an external iomega drive, I expect it to function the same as my parallel zip drive which has an eject button, and possibly send an interrupt to the system to tell it that the disk has been ejected, such that it can be removed from the desktop UI.
bibilit
Well-known member
Would try a Zip as a boot device, never tried before but collected a complete working SCSI unit (including floppy driver, Zip tools and PSU) a couple of months ago.
Zip drivers seems to be pretty unreliable, anyone knows how to fix the "click of death" symptom ?? (i used to have an usb one who died quickly)
Zip drivers seems to be pretty unreliable, anyone knows how to fix the "click of death" symptom ?? (i used to have an usb one who died quickly)
techknight
Well-known member
i think there is an article floating around the web that explained the root cause of it, but it was due to the heads failing because some sort of tension problem? dont quote me on that. I cant exactly remember. I know supposedly after the whole lawsuit thing, it was fixed in later versions.
AichEss
Well-known member
FWIW I use a Zip drive as a HD with my Apple IIGS. It is a lot less noisy than my SCSI hard drives and, quite frankly, I have more confidence in it than the real HDs.
Two more pluses; Zip drives are more available and less costly.
The drive ejects the disk on shutdown but I haven't tried to make it not so. All I do is shove the disk back in before starting up.
Iomega has sold tons of drives in spite of the "unreliable" knock they've taken. I don't think all that many of the sales were just replacements for the failed ones.
Two more pluses; Zip drives are more available and less costly.
The drive ejects the disk on shutdown but I haven't tried to make it not so. All I do is shove the disk back in before starting up.
Iomega has sold tons of drives in spite of the "unreliable" knock they've taken. I don't think all that many of the sales were just replacements for the failed ones.
Iomega hit the market with the Zip drive in 1994 at just the right time.
Folks needed something with more capacity than a floppy. CDR and CDRW was not yet affordable (not available). At introduction, the drives were a fairly affordable (for the time) < $200 and the cartridges were $20. Within a few years the drives were closer to $100 and the cartridges dropped to $10 to $15 each.
In a similar time frame, the 90mm magneto optical drive was available with either 230MB or 640MB capacity.
I was particularly fond of the Fujitsu DynaMO drive. In the mid to late 90s it was about $300 new, so almost three times the cost of the ZIP drive, but the cartridges cost about the same as ZIP cartridges and held six times as much data. Additionally, they were ridiculously reliable.
If you needed very much storage capacity, the DynaMO became much more economical than the ZIP since the cost per MB is 1/6 as expensive.
If you can find one, I'd use a DynaMO 640 as the boot drive for an old Mac.
Unfortunately, the sweet spot for MO seems to have passed. For several years, they were showing up at Goodwill and on Ebay for $10 - $25 for the drives. Then some joker on Ebay started buying them all up and reselling them for hundreds of dollars. I got outbid on one several years ago at about $40, and ten minutes after the auction, the guy who outbid me was offering to sell me the drive for $400. Grrr. That was back when one could see bidder IDs.
Anyway, if one turns up at a reasonable price at a thrift shop or something (never happen on Ebay again) I'd recommend that you snatch it up.
These days, ZIP does have the advantage that it's much much easier to find cheaply.
Folks needed something with more capacity than a floppy. CDR and CDRW was not yet affordable (not available). At introduction, the drives were a fairly affordable (for the time) < $200 and the cartridges were $20. Within a few years the drives were closer to $100 and the cartridges dropped to $10 to $15 each.
In a similar time frame, the 90mm magneto optical drive was available with either 230MB or 640MB capacity.
I was particularly fond of the Fujitsu DynaMO drive. In the mid to late 90s it was about $300 new, so almost three times the cost of the ZIP drive, but the cartridges cost about the same as ZIP cartridges and held six times as much data. Additionally, they were ridiculously reliable.
If you needed very much storage capacity, the DynaMO became much more economical than the ZIP since the cost per MB is 1/6 as expensive.
If you can find one, I'd use a DynaMO 640 as the boot drive for an old Mac.
Unfortunately, the sweet spot for MO seems to have passed. For several years, they were showing up at Goodwill and on Ebay for $10 - $25 for the drives. Then some joker on Ebay started buying them all up and reselling them for hundreds of dollars. I got outbid on one several years ago at about $40, and ten minutes after the auction, the guy who outbid me was offering to sell me the drive for $400. Grrr. That was back when one could see bidder IDs.
Anyway, if one turns up at a reasonable price at a thrift shop or something (never happen on Ebay again) I'd recommend that you snatch it up.
These days, ZIP does have the advantage that it's much much easier to find cheaply.
Maybe, but it seems like certain variants pull a lot more on ebay than you would expect for a "dead" technology. I recently picked up one of the early USB 250s (the one with a separate power adapter) in order to use it with the FW adapter. I don't know how many auctions I watched and bidded on before I got one at <$15. Most were starting for more than that... and selling.
There seems to be an odd but active community of Zip users. I know some is from vintage synths, but still...
I got given the parallel zip drive in the late 90s.
Didn't use it much until I went to university in the early 2000s.
This was when floppy disks were starting to show their limitations in terms of size, but USB pen drives were still quite small and expensive.
Most of the machines in the computer lab had Zip drives, and I bought an ex-lab G3 with an internal Zip drive.
Then the USB pen got bigger and cheaper, and when you could get 128MB on your keyring for < £10, that was the start of the end for the zip.
Mine has sat gathering dust for years, but the mac formatted zip disk I have and the prospect of using a SCSI as a Mac Plus HDD, plus the portability between it, the classic and the desktop PC (and from there via USB stick / network drive the G4, hackintosh, internet etc.) appeals.
Didn't use it much until I went to university in the early 2000s.
This was when floppy disks were starting to show their limitations in terms of size, but USB pen drives were still quite small and expensive.
Most of the machines in the computer lab had Zip drives, and I bought an ex-lab G3 with an internal Zip drive.
Then the USB pen got bigger and cheaper, and when you could get 128MB on your keyring for < £10, that was the start of the end for the zip.
Mine has sat gathering dust for years, but the mac formatted zip disk I have and the prospect of using a SCSI as a Mac Plus HDD, plus the portability between it, the classic and the desktop PC (and from there via USB stick / network drive the G4, hackintosh, internet etc.) appeals.
