I bought one of these around 1998-99. It came with four 250meg disks, and I bought one other disk some time later - for a ludicrous £14.99, what was I thinking! I made the mistake of getting the parallel-port model, mainly because I also had an Atari ST (still have!) and figured that someone would eventually produce a Zip driver for it. I figured wrong - turns out that Atari in an effort to save a few pennies engineered a non-standard parallel-port, omitting some crucial signals required by the zip-drive. Anyway, the zip-drive got practically no use.
Recently I dug it out again, having almost forgotten about it. The only real use it had ever been was in getting software/videos I had downloaded at work (so free internet!) onto my home computer - so it had been lying unused for at least 10 years. Hooking it up again, I was disappointed to find that none of the disks were readable. Given that the disks are very robust physically and were practically unused, I reasoned that it was probably dirty heads, so cracked open the drive, as much out of curiosity than any thing else. The 'head' is microscopic and definitely not designed for manual cleaning. Suffice it to say, I eventually managed to get the drive to read all but one of the disks simply by repeatedly trying to read them. Unfortunately I managed to get a single file of a few megs off of them. The rest (mostly Seinfeld episodes) would supply a few megs before throwing up an 'unreadable' error. After that the infamous "click of death" associated with the zip-drive took on a new meaning - it's hugely irritating!
Anyway, the one disk that refused to be read or format (click... click... click... ARGHHH!!) caused me to hit on the idea of trying to wipe it with a very strong neodymium magnet. And it worked, well it certainly put an end to the click-of-death, and... nothing - it refused to format, produce an error, nothing, just silence - I was intrigued, so went investigating.
Undoubtedly the best source of technical information on zip drives is available at the Gibson Research Corporation web-site. I was already familiar with this site as it provides a great free way of checking your firewall. Well this guy also provides non-free drive backup/recovery software, including for the zip-drives when they were in vogue. He also has probably delved deeper into problems associated with zip-drives that anyone on the planet, even providing a software tool to diagnose problems, and which is now free and available here. Note that you will have to temporarily set your computer clock back a couple of years as the software will not run after the year 2010. It also would not work on XP, which was a surprise - maybe SP3 was to blame. It works fine with Win98 though, which I have kept around mainly for formatting double-density (as opposed to high-density) floppy disks, something XP won't even attempt.
This tool is very useful, although very slow in operation. It scans the entire disk, which for 250 meg disks takes about 4 hours! The results are also slightly confusing. The one disk I scanned completely was found to have hundreds of 'read' errors, dozens of 'soft' errors (no 'hard' errors) and diagnosed along the lines of "There is something seriously wrong with this disk". Thing is, files could be read & written to this disk perfectly, its whole 250megs, and before & after running the test, with no errors being produced.
The one thing it provided definite insights into was the disk I had wiped with the magnet. Here it spat it out of the drive almost immediately, saying that the drive had reported that it could find none of the four "Z-tracks", which rendered the drive unusable. Much worse, Mr Gibson said he had also back in the day contacted multiple Iomega engineers about this and was assured that it was impossible to re-create these 'Z-tracks' via the zip-drive.
This really sucks. Why engineer something with obsolescence built-in, that absolutely and positively WILL be rendered unusable in time. When these software-formatted 'Z-tracks' degrade magnetically to the point that they become unreadable, the disks WILL become unusable. Even after 'just' 15 years, my five disks are almost there already given the trouble I have had reading/reformatting them. This must have been a deliberate policy on the part of Iomega, an attempt to insure a regular income stream from new disk sales. They could just as easily have allowed the drive to create these 'Z-tracks'.
And there are still people actively selling zip disks on eBay and elsewhere. Given that most of them were manufactured over 10 years ago, buying them would seem a very risky venture.
One thing is certain, had I known about this back in 1998, I would never have bought a zip-drive. I am pretty disgusted with Iomega.
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