Re: 1.2M or 1.44M?
Iomega Zip drives were bad. SyQuest drives were much worse. The place I was working at during the 1990s started out with a lot of 5.25" SyQuest drives, which quickly became a few SyQuest drives, despite dead drives being replaced on a regular basis. We called them SyPest drives and hated them. Zip and Jaz drives were much better behaved. When they arrived, we binned the SyPest drives as quickly as possible (we had to take data from outside which usually arrived on a SyPest disk; we introduced the other parties to Zip and Jaz drives, and lo! the number of SyPest disks fell to near zero inside of two-three months, that's how hated they were.
I had a beige PowerMac G3 which shipped with an internal SCSI Zip drive at the office. The internal Zip worked very well until the Mac was replaced by a new one, which didn't have a Zip; I bought the old beige off the company at the depreciated value of near zero, and used it at home for years. The Zip drive lasted for years at home, well past the time that the office stopped using Zip drives because the newer, cheaper, more shoddily built (gee, I wonder if there was a connection between those last two items...) external Zips broke so easily. Even at their worst, though, they weren't up to SyPest standards of breakage. The beige G3 still works; Apple said that it could have a max of 192 MB (that's megabyte) of RAM, three 64 MB sticks. In reality it could have 768 MB, three 256 MB sticks. It could run OS X 10.2 fairly quickly and is still my go-to machine for running certain older software (that would be spelled 'games'). The Zip drive doesn't work any more; I yanked the old Zip drive and replaced it with an UltraSCSI drive attached to a PCI card, which speeded up the machine noticeably. But I haven't seen a Zip disk for a very long time.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
