Removable media, which is better

[luckybob]

I've always known about the zip drive. I remember how useful it was. How we had 2 drives die to the "click of death". The whole nine yards. Long story short, I've been using an new ide 250mb drive and a scsi 100mb drive to transfer files between my ibm system and mac. However, this weekend I came across a Syquest EZ 135 drive with 1 disk and wall-wart. works perfectly too!

I did know that syquest drives existed, however this is the first one that i've ever seen in the flesh. Naturally, I don't trust the zip disk. Are these syquest drives any better? Should I get a 2nd scsi drive off ebay and use it to transfer files? the drive itself probably isnt worth much, but I do like the disks better than iomega's. I never liked the eject KERCHUNK they made, as a kid I was convinced if I wasn't careful it would cut off one of my fingers. I have no use for the drive, if I use zip disks, and the opposite is true I guess. Anyone have any input?

 

[Unknown_K]

These days the best removable media would be whatever is the most common and cheapest. ZIP drives came in all kinds of Macs in the PPC era and there are plenty of external SCSI models that would work on everything down to the oldest SCSI compact mac. I had zip disks with data from back to the mid 1990's and they still work fine, never had a click of death drive yet.

I do like the old Syquest 88MB drives as well as a few types of MO drives, they are easy to install since they are all SCSI and work like a normal HD would.

As far as reliability goes, if you are just using them to move files and not as long term archives then they are all fine. Nothing of that era beats MO media for archives.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I'll second the Zip drive motion, never had any real problems with them as data transfer or backup media. I've got one on every system in use at any given time.

Some people seem to have had nothing but bad luck with them, but my experience makes me wonder how much of that can really be true. YMMV.

 

[LCGuy]

As some of the people who were here back in the old days will remember, I got a Zip in 2000 that lasted for about 18 months before it got the "silent click of death". Never been a real big fan of Zip drives after that, however really, after all this time I'd imagine that any Zip thats lasted until now is probably pretty safe. I have a Zip in my Beige G3, and while its slow (my previous Zip was a Zip 250, this is a Zip 100), I can't fault it.

Really, for long term archival, your best bet is to have multiple copies of stuff stored on different types of media.

 

[waynestewart]

If you're just moving files from one machine to another then anything that works is fine. Reliability isn't a factor in a case like this. For archiving I'd use something for which I had several drives and maybe burn a few copies to archival quality CDs

 

[olePigeon]

I'm a huge fan of the 3.5" MO drive. They range from 128MBs to 2.3GBs in size, come in SCSI and IDE, and work on anything from System 6 through OS X, and DOS through Windows 7. They're awesome! I used Anubis utilities to format a disk with Apple drivers, and now I can boot off it as an emergency disk. I put the whole Apple Emergency CD on it.

 

[trag]

In today's world, unless you're dealing with older machines, I would just use DVDRW. The disks are about $.50 each, they hold over 4 GB, your computers probably have a drive already built-in which can read and write them, and they can be reused hundreds of times or something like that. Or if you seldom author a new disk, just use DVD-R and spend the $.10 per disk.

If you're looking for something for machines older than commonly had CDRW drives, I'm with Olepigeon. I like MO. It was always superior to Zip. Cartridges, contemporaneous with the introduction of Zip, cost the same as Zip, but hold six times as much data. The media is probably the most reliable stuff available except for chiseling in stone. The only reason MO didn't become popular instead of Zip is that the cost of the drives was about twice as much.

I have several of the Fujitsu DynaMO 640 SCSI drives. I really like them. And they look cool, with the sleek jet black cases and violet highlights.

 

[olePigeon]

An alternative would be a SCSI Imation SuperDisk Drive. It would also double as a 1.4MB floppy drive. However, they're currently more expensive and harder to find than an MO drive that can hold 20x as much.

 

[Unknown_K]

There were quite a few cool things for offline storage and file transfer before networking became the norm.

 

[TylerEss]

I really like DVD-RAM on 68k Macs. 2.6GB per side (5.2GB per disk) of "mounts on the desktop" removable storage and it doubles as a CDROM drive.

I keep a spare SCSI DVD-RAM drive, because I worry about what I'd do if the drive died and I couldn't read any of my disks. Zip has the advantage in ubiquity.

 

[Unknown_K]

Yea, I don't use any type of media for anything serious unless I have multiple drives around to read the backups.

Think I have 4 or 5 1.3GB 5.25" MO drives, multiples of DDS 1,2,3,4 DAT a few AIT2 etc. Recently got into LTO1 and DLT as well.

The only drive I don't have media for is a Jaz2 I got in a 9600 Powermac.

 

[register]

Since I started to use CompactFlash cards with a PCMCIA adaptor in a PB1400 some years ago, I use CF and SD cards with adapters and card readers as a preferred removable media on any kind of computer. For old Macintosh computers I use an Adtron PCMCIA card reader in an external SCSI enclosure. More recent machines sport a PCMCIA card reader, USB or even more recent slots for flash storage. It just works reliable and fast, uses little space and I do rarely run into compatibility issues. Media are cheap and available from running production. I agree that a network connection would be even more convenient in many cases, but removable media work around elegantly around many issues you might encounter when trying to set up a mixed network with components of recent make and other components from the beginning of the PC era.

ZIP, MO and SuperDisk drives and media are still at hand, but I did not use any of them for years.

 

[Unknown_K]

My latest G4 came with a caddy loading 1x Apple DVD-RAM drive, the old CDROM caddies doen't work on those do they?

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I've never even seen a caddy-loading *DVD* drive, I thought they were all way past that era. I imagine a CD-caddy would work fine, though.

 

[TylerEss]

The caddies are only for 2.6GB/side DVD-RAM disks. Usually, the 2.6GB/side DVD-RAM disks are in permanent caddies, much like MO disks.

If you look inside the maw of the thing when it's open, you'll see a little slot on each side. It accepts CD- and DVD-ROMs naked.

 

[Ike]

Thanks a lot for the info on the Syquest drives!

i'm thinking of buying one in the original external enclosure, with 10x 88mb disks new in packaging for 20 euro's incl. shipping...

sound like quite a good deal to me since we almost have no zip or jaz drives for sale here... just a lot of hp tape storage stuff.

 

[Unknown_K]

I finally got some 1gb and 2gb Jazz disks for a drive I have in a 9600 Powermac. Those disks don't pop up cheap that much (compared to zip disks anyway).

 

[CC_333]

Those disks don't pop up cheap that much (compared to zip disks anyway).

Both 1 and 2 GB JAZ disks can be had on Amazon.com for around $10.00-$14.00/ea new or $1.15-$$3.00/ea used. The 1 GB disks are slightly more expensive for some reason, but the difference is negligible if one only gets 1 or 2 of them at a time.
They're PC formatted, but it's easy enough to reformat them for use on a Mac.

c

 

[gmipf]

I really like DVD-RAM on 68k Macs. 2.6GB per side (5.2GB per disk) of "mounts on the desktop" removable storage and it doubles as a CDROM drive.

I keep a spare SCSI DVD-RAM drive, because I worry about what I'd do if the drive died and I couldn't read any of my disks. Zip has the advantage in ubiquity.

How do you format DVD-RAM on 68k Macs? Whatever I tried, I couldn't format the DVD-RAM. Tried on 7.6 and 8.1. Only CD-ROMs are working.