Message-ID: <001201c23a1d$6c093300$c03dfea9@atlantis> From: "Matthias Paul" To: References: <2002731 DOT 14185 AT olim DOT 1 DOT 45> Subject: Re: 250Mb ZIP drives Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2002 14:00:35 +0200 Organization: Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), Germany MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by delorie.com id g72C9uG13262 Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com 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 -- ; http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org "Programs are poems for computers."