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ScuzzBlog: Diaries October 2018

Entry 2nd October 2018: Post 01: Iomega Man


Iomega ZIP Drive
It is easy to forget in today's mass storage world floating high on
clouds that remembering stuff on a computer did cost a small fortune.
For a long time hard drives were just so expensive and you could
easily be paying out £1 for every megabyte of hard drive space.

And so, when Iomega brought out the ZIP drive I jumped at the chance
of freeing up valuable hard drive space with their wonderful 100MB
removable ZIP disks. At first they cost £19.99 a pop and I must have
been buying them once a week when they first came out. The price
did steady off at £14.99 but that was after a time of being a
slightly higher price of £16.99.

Having been going through the processes of setting up the ZIP on the
Amiga 2000 I decided to pull all my ZIP disks to see just how many
I have. Excluding the 250MB disks of which I have a few the grand
total was 111 disks. If I use the average figure of £16.99 per disk
that equates to a total sum of £1885.89p for 11,100 MB or 17p/MB.

I have every version of the ZIP drive and quite a few mounted in
PCs including the 250MB drive. I exclude the JAZ drive which I view
as a different product.

I have had one SCSI drive fail and only one disk ever cause a problem.
They have been so reliable over the years and continue to be so. The
great benefit to me is that they are readable on the Amiga and the PC.
I just use the old FAT system on the Amiga and I can read the long
file names to the PC.

A great tool and one I would be lost without. The disks carry the
brain of my Amiga world and copies of all my various Workbench
set ups. Simply the best of the best when it comes to storage.

One thing to avoid though, is having the ZIP anything other than
last on a chain as they spin down and will lock the computer drives
up that are further down the chain.

Iomega ZIP Drive 100MB

11,100 MB of Amiga data all safely stored on ZIP.

Essential ZIP Tools for the PC. Not required on the Amiga.

Recording software for the PC that came with the ZIP disk.

Average cost of a ZIP disk around £16.99.

Different makes of ZIP disk.

Tools for the drives came later on CD. How odd.

Very very easy to install.

Various ZIP storage shelves and tidies.

I generally fit ZIP drives to all my PCs.

Cheap PC that already had the ZIP drive.

PCs are networked to the Amiga.

My Win98 machine which I purchased with the ZIP
drive installed. Beside it is my Win95 machine
which had the slower external Parallel Port ZIP.

The great thing is that ALL the ZIPs can read
all the disks whether on the Amiga or PC making
it just magic for transferring and storing data.

And trust me 100MB is lot of storage for an Amiga.
It easily holds the biggest Workbench OS.


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Last updated 2nd October 2018

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