Mail Archives: opendos/2002/08/02/09:13:07
On 2002-07-31, Alex Venn wrote:
> They are the drives I've been using and my experience was as yours.
> If the 250s are as good as the 100s I've got six or seven years of
> trouble-free use ahead of me.
Well, I loved them - until one of the drives broke with the well-known
Click-of-Death and destroyed several ZIP media with important data
before I recognized the fault. Since then, I no longer trust in them,
and only use them rarely.
Also, not only in my own experience, Iomega's support is almost
non-existant and not user friendly.
>> Of course, you will not be able to use USB ZIP drives under any
>> DOS, but if you get one of the rare SCSI or ATAPI ZIP-250 drives,
>> they should work just fine.
>
> Don't the Cypress drivers work ? The way I read the DUSE 4.2 docs,
> they should work with most USB disk drives, including ZIPs.
I am not aware of them, do you have a link?
>> PS. Has anyone tested one of the new LS-240 drives under DR-DOS yet?
>
> Never even seen one ! My attempts at getting an LS-120 to work wasn't
> exactly a resounding success, but the drives are very hard to find in
> the UK these days. From the number I've seen in skips they either
> didn't work that well or just lost the popularity race.
Definitely, they were much slower than ZIP drives. Most people
I know over here use ZIP-100 drives, only very few use LS-120 drives.
The advantage of LS drives is that they can still read/write
1.44 Mb/2Mb HD floppy disks (for unknown reasons no 2.88/4 Mb ED
floppy disks), and according to some newsgroup talk the LS drives
and media are less prone to fatal faults compared to the rather
widespread hardware problems with ZIP drives.
Reportedly, the LS-240 drives are much faster than the original
LS-120 ones (but still not as fast as ZIP-100/250). However, they
support a feature I find interesting for technically reasons, as
they can format a normal 1.44 Mb HD floppy medium up to 30 Mb.
I have no idea how reliable this is, though. Would the drives
be cheaper (at present they are given away for ca. EUR 210,- as
external USB devices here) and would they be available as internal
SCSI or ATAPI drives, I would certainly experiment with them.
Greetings,
Matthias
--
<mailto:Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>; <mailto:mpaul AT drdos DOT org>
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org
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