why do people still buy Zip drives?

[UALOneKPlus]

I was at CompUSA a couple of weeks ago, and some lady bought a 250MB Zip Drive.

I was thinking "what a waste of $$$". My friends all agree, and have ditched Zip drives over 4 years ago.

Why do ppl continue to buy these dinosaurs?

[cfitz]

I think because they are easy to use. To many people a ZIP disc seems just like a floppy on steroids, and they already know how to use a floppy drive. I have non-technical friends who are intimidated by CD-R, but are comfortable using a ZIP drive. I've tried to convince them to give CD-R a try, but they are quite resistant. I wish they would use CD-R for backups, but I guess a backup on ZIP is better than no backup at all (how much better is open to debate... ).

cfitz

[BuddhaTB]

I agree with what cfitz said. Also another reason is because some older Mac's can't support CD-RW drives. My aunts Mac that she's still using had no extra drive bays or USB/firewire ports that could be used to hook-up a CD-RW drive. Also, I doubt there are any cheap CD-RW drives that would work on a Mac/Apple computer anyways. If anyone has owned a Mac from 7-10 years ago, you know how hard it is to upgrade those things. My aunt eventually had to buy a SCSI card in order to use an external ZIP 250 drive. So for some small minority, Zip drives are the only option for portage storage devices. I still have my Zip 100 external drive setting in a closet, probably not even worth my time to sell that thing. I'd probably have to pay someone to take it from me.

Anyways, Mac's suck, but I do like that thing called an iPod.

[dodecahedron]

My aunt eventually had to buy a SCSI card in order to use an external ZIP 250 drive.

if so, then she can use an external SCSI CD-RW drive!
why don't you buy her a nice present - Plextor PlexWriter PX-W4012TS ???
or perhaps a nifty CRW-F1ZSX ?

[egomaniacal1]

First off i kinda like Zip drives now that they have a capacity as great as cd-r's. I like the ideal of being able to put important stuff on Zip as opposed to cd-r becuz cd's can get scratched or broked. I just think having more than one type of portable disk storage is a good thing.....i mean a house full of cd's is not my ideal of utopia.

[BuddhaTB]

if so, then she can use an external SCSI CD-RW drive!
why don't you buy her a nice present - Plextor PlexWriter PX-W4012TS ???
or perhaps a nifty CRW-F1ZSX ?

Well, she's a teacher and wanted the Zip drive instead, because she could transfer stuff between home and the computers at school. For some reason, the Mac's at her school had zip drives in them. It'd be perfect if the school's computers had CD-RW drives, then she could just burn the stuff and transfer them between.

As for the idea of buying a SCSI CD-RW drive, she's planning on getting a new Mac soon, so there won't be no need in that. How much would an external SCSI CD-RW drive cost, since I never did any research into that area.

I'm just glad my school has a bunch of newer Dell's to work with. In my entire college, I think there are only 4 iMac's and they are all in the library for people to check their e-mail. Grade schools rock Mac's while college's rock Dell's.

[dodecahedron]

As for the idea of buying a SCSI CD-RW drive, she's planning on getting a new Mac soon, so there won't be no need in that. How much would an external SCSI CD-RW drive cost, since I never did any research into that area.

i was just kidding.
Yamaha CRW-F1ZSX external SCSI - $293 cheapest on pricegrabber.
Plextor PlexWriter PX-W1210TS 12/10/32 external SCSI - $246

[Ian]

At work we're trying to switch from Zip's to CD-RW drives. The students like it... but its hard to convince the faculty that CD-RW discs are better. Stupid professors.. but thats another story.

[BuddhaTB]

Same with my college, all the computers in the public computing labs have zip drives. However, some of the new Dell's in the engineering computer labs have CD-RW drives.

[UALOneKPlus]

I still have my parallel 100MB Zip Drive from 5 years ago, which I pulled out last month and painfully endured the copying process of the disks to my HD, which I then proceed to burn onto 1 CD-R.

I agree Zip Drives are more durable (with the plastic casing that is 3-5 times the thickness of a CD-R it better be!), but the pricing is so out of whack it just doesn't make economic sense. I still see Zip disks at about $7-$10 per disk, compared to $0 - $0.33 per CD-R, and the CD-R is so much more widely adopted on every PC, it's just mind boggling how economically it doesn't make sense.

Oh well, I hope the Zip Drive will slowly go away, as consumers who continue to buy these things just do themselves disservice, by spending more $$$ than needed. Also it's a pain when someone hands me data on a Zip Disk. I always chuckle and give it right back.

[Spazmogen]

ZIP drives. I had a 100mb parallel port model from about 1996 or 1997.

Nice drive, slow by today's standards.


It has one feature that cd's don't have: password protection.
You can cram a tonne of sensitive stuff on there (student marks, nudie pictures or both) and password protect it.

If memory serves right, there is no way to recover the data if you forget the password. Unless someone has made a crack for it. Which is illegal of course.

Of course, no one has ever made a disc of nudie pictures.

Certainaly not me

[dodecahedron]

hmm......well......

you can emulate this by creating a big .zip or .rar file, that contains all your data (zero compression to save time) and use a password to encrypt the info. then burn this big zip/rar file to the CD!

by the way, like your avatar!



i know it's rude, but i keep staring at the monitor

[cfitz]

I don't know about ZIP drive and RAR password protection, but .zip file password protection is incredibly weak and easily broken. Stick with PGP for real encryption.

cfitz

[dodecahedron]

WinRAR encryption is better than WinZip, or so the Help files claim.

Unlike ZIP, RAR format allows to encrypt not only file data, but also other sensitive archive areas: file names, sizes, attributes, comments and other blocks.
...
ZIP format uses a proprietary encryption algorithm. RAR archives are encrypted by the much stronger AES-128 standard. If you need to encrypt important information, it is better to select the RAR archive format. For real security use passwords of at least 8 characters in length. Do not use words of any language as passwords, it is better to choose a random combination of characters and digits. Note that passwords are case sensitive. Remember that if you lose your password, you will unable to retrieve the encrypted files, not even the WinRAR author is able to extract encrypted files.

i don't know about PGP.

[cfitz]

http://www.pgpi.org/download/
http://www.pgp.com/display.php?pageID=83

cfitz

[Spazmogen]

I don't think PGP will help out on a cd-r. I've used it in the past. You set up a virtual drive that has ALL of the contents passphrase protected. It's really just a big PGP file on your hard disk, but you have to mount the drive in PGP, enter the passphrase before you can add/remove or even see the contents.

The only way I can see that working with a cd-r(w) would be with packet writing and using the whole disc (all 500+ mb) after packet writing as a virtual drive for PGP.

ZIP drive password protection is pretty old, and therefore possibly weak. it came out when 128bit encryption was a theory only.

You write the contents to the ZIP drive disk, then chose to password protect it. God help you if you ever forget the password. I formatted 1 disk as a result of my bad memory. You can't even get access to the contents of the disk to see if you have the right one. Label them accordingly...


Avatar: Samantha Fox. She's doing another topless picture shoot for www.page3.com. It's online on Friday, in The Lodge part of the site.
Hard to believe it's been 20 years since her first appearance ! I was enjoying BuddhaTB's avatar, then I came across that picture advertising the upcoming feature on www.page3.com

[cfitz]

I don't think PGP will help out on a cd-r.

As an encrypted filesystem, probably not, unless it could be made to work with packet-writing software as you suggest (PGP and packet writing - sounds like trouble). But you can still encrypt individual files and store them on CD-R. An encrypted file is no different than any other file as far as copying, transferring and storing. It's just a bunch of bytes.

cfitz

[F1Pilot]

I still have a ZIP drive because the computers at work are older, BUT have a ZIP in them. It's just a matter of convenience, and a way around the fact that they're too cheap to buy a $21.73 burner. blah.

[mikeg]

another small mind exposed

[UALOneKPlus]

Is this a good encryption tool? I have a friend who uses it and seems to like it.

http://www.tip.net.au/~njpayne/

[Spazmogen]

It's a one way operation. Whack anyone that comes near your discs.

I hope you have First Aid / CPR skills.

That link in the post above seems pretty good. 160bit encryption.

[KuoH]

The password feature on older ZIP100 discs only prevent the driver from presenting the data to the OS and is easily circumvented in most cases. It does not encrypt the data on the disk, so any tool that can access the data on the disc without using the driver can read the contents.

Password removal procedure --> [/url]http://groups.google.com/groups?q=iomega+zip+password&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=8tbu3v%24d1f%240%40dosa.alt.net&rnum=1[url]

KuoH

It has one feature that cd's don't have: password protection.
You can cram a tonne of sensitive stuff on there (student marks, nudie pictures or both) and password protect it.

[/url]

[aviationwiz]

Zip is the way of the past. Jaz is the way of the future!

20GB on one disk!