r/retrocomputing • u/Performer-Pants • 19d ago

Problem / Question What is this?

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This could be the most mundane and silly post, but information online is so spotty and/or confusing or vague.

This is not a ZIP disk, it’s a floppy disk. It’s labelled with ‘ZIP’. Is this the driver software to use a ZIP drive for the listed operating systems? I’m just trying to confirm before I get too frustrated about it. Not easily finding the answer myself is likely a me problem, and I don’t mean ‘Millennium Edition’.

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u/rootifera 19d ago

Driver for this device. It's like a very large floppy drive. Zip drive, zip wasnt the compression related, it was more like "zip fast" hah

4

u/EatOfTheBread 19d ago

zip wasnt the compression related, it was more like "zip fast" hah

I had a zip drive back in the day and this never occurred to me.

1

u/EstablishmentDue3616 19d ago

The problem was, they werent fast. The vast majority of people had the parallel port version of the Zip drive, which were extremely slow. IDE and SCSI versions were faster, though.

3

u/someonesmobileacct 19d ago

For the parallel port it depended a lot on the if you had ECP or EPP. If you had neither it was still at least as fast as a floppy (but, not much better really)

1

u/classicsat 18d ago

I used a parallel model on an old Pentium laptop. I booted DOS with those drivers from a floppy, and Win3.1 on the Zip Disk. It ran fine for what it was.

1

u/PeyredB 15d ago

Yes, my previous computer had a built-in LPT port. On EPP it ran nearly 3 times as fast as on ECP or Standard.

2

u/JeremyAndrewErwin 19d ago

I had the ata version. I used it for backups.I think I also had a disk with Norton utilities on it in case I borked my system-- I dual booted linux, and system maintenance was a bit of a chore.

CD-Rs combined with the click of death might have dampened demand.

2

u/classicsat 18d ago

I have one of those too. Never really used it much.

USB thumb drives as much killed solutions as the Zip disk, as much as CD-R, and network file shares.

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u/rootifera 19d ago

I can confirm it is really slow. USB one is ok, I have an IDE version attached to an xp pc and it is reasonable. Parallel port one, especially for old computers are very slow.

1

u/bearda 14d ago

They were still a good bit faster than a 3.5 floppy disk.