Zip drive, Jaz drive or something else?

[tommijazz91]

Hello everyone!

My SCSI Zip drive is having some problems lately. At first my SE/30 freezes if the Zip inserted is not properly recognized. The Zip drive suddenly stops and the whole thing crashes. It seemed to happen with just one faulty cartridge, but now I can’t read any of them.

Should I change to something more reliable? Maybe a Jaz Drive? The Zip is very useful for transferring files between my SE/30 and a G3 iMac with a USB Zip drive, so I hope to achieve the same with another peripheral.

I’m not sure I am ready to buy a SCSI2SD, but I’m open to suggestions.

 

[dochilli]

I would buy a SCSI2SD. ZIP and Jaz are old and will fail in future.

 

[Unknown_K]

ZIP disks that are damaged will damage the zip drives and any disks you insert into them.

Toss all the damaged disks and the zip drive and find another scsi zip drive and get some new disks.

I assume you have other machines with a ZIP drive so transferring files is easy.

MO drives seem to be reliable and nothing bad ever happens to the media plus they are fast enough to saturate the SCSI bus of a SE/30. 

 

[tommijazz91]

The only Zip drives I have are one SCSI and one usb. I had a third one but it has the click of death so it’s out of the equation.

Until some days ago it was a very efficient way of transferring files, but now that I have a network card I could also switch to SCSI2SD: it seems a bit expensive but also the most reliable way of saving/transferring files.

Now that I think more about it, if I start buying Zip drives I will always risk a malfunctionIng sooner or later.

I don’t know much about amo drives, I’m gonna take a look into it.

Also, my Zip drive was my boot disk for a Macintosh Plus: can SCSI2SD replace it as well, maybe with another partition, so as to use one partition for the SE/30 and the other for the Plus?

 

[dochilli]

For the plus you need an external power supply (USB) for the SCSI2SD. It is not easy to get a bootable SCSI2SD for the plus, but it is possible. 

Another option for you could be the floppyemu.