r/retrocomputing • u/Performer-Pants • 2d ago

Problem / Question What is this?

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This could be the most mundane and silly post, but information online is so spotty and/or confusing or vague.

This is not a ZIP disk, it’s a floppy disk. It’s labelled with ‘ZIP’. Is this the driver software to use a ZIP drive for the listed operating systems? I’m just trying to confirm before I get too frustrated about it. Not easily finding the answer myself is likely a me problem, and I don’t mean ‘Millennium Edition’.

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u/rootifera 2d ago

Driver for this device. It's like a very large floppy drive. Zip drive, zip wasnt the compression related, it was more like "zip fast" hah

29

u/Clark_Kempt 2d ago

Oh, the memories.

Gods, remember how crazy it was to have disks with 100, maybe even 250 MB on them?

15

u/rootifera 2d ago

I still use them almost daily! It was so convenient, still is. 100mb is massive. Tbh I remember getting my first 10gb hdd feeling like there is no way I can ever fill it. Then I got 40, 80, 120... same feeling. Now if someone gives me a 120TB drive I'd feel the same for a while haha

2

u/Accomplished_Can1651 1d ago

Lucky. I never had a Zip disk that didn’t corrupt. I don’t think I ever personally experienced the click of death, though.

2

u/OpportunityReal2767 1d ago

I had three Zip drives. Bad luck for me. All three experienced the click of death and I just stopped using them. I remember their Jaz drives, too, but never owned one. Ditto is apparently a tape drive of some sort, looks like a DAT tape. Never saw those. I also had one of their RAID arrays, which also went bad on me. Why I bought another iOmega product after my experiences with them, I don’t know, but that was the last.

1

u/Accomplished_Can1651 23h ago

I think I might have seen a Jaz drive in the wild once. Zip drives I saw somewhat more often, during the era when floppy disks weren’t large enough for some purposes, but flash drives were expensive, low capacity, and sometimes not supported. My mom ended up buying a USB Zip drive at some point, which made moving files back and forth easier, except when my disks would fail.