My experiences with a scsi iomegia zip drive (100mb)

[Andrew]

Hi all,

I recently acquired a scsi iomega zip drive and wanted to share my experience using it with a mac plus.

a) The 4.2 driver is required in order to auto-mount the zip disk and to eject it.
b) Once you perform a normal format on the disk, you can copy a system folder, and immediately you can use it as a bootable volume
c) In case you use a zip disk as a boot volume, you do NOT need the iomega driver. It is not as if you can eject it anyways.
d) Boot times are comparable to scsi2sd
e) Since my iomega wall adapter failed, I have been able to successfully power it using a normal 5V usb cable attached to a modern PC.
f) I have tried to power the iomega zip drive from the scsi termination power (by using an internal jumper cable). Unfortunately it seems that the power is not enough and the 5V drops to arround 4.17V. It would seems that this would work, considering that the iomega zip drive only draws 500ma of power. Do you have any thoughts? (I have added an 1A diode inside the mac plus in order for it to provide termination power)

 

[MrFahrenheit]

Iomega Zip 100 is an invaluable tool. Disks are relatively inexpensive, and you can use one even with System 6 on a Mac as old as an SE.

 

[Nixontheknight]

and you can use one even with System 6 on a Mac as old as an SE

I'm sure you can use it on a Plus as well

 

[MrFahrenheit]

I'm sure you can use it on a Plus as well

I'm sure you can, but I haven't tried myself, so I didn't want to give advice I hadn't checked out.

 

[LaPorta]

Yes, for years I used it as my startup disk for a Plus before FloppyEmu, etc, became a reality.