I spoke today to two computer salesmen at Best Buy about the relative merits of a CD-RW versus a 100-meg Zip drive. One boy said the former is best for my needs; the other said the latter.
My habit has been to work on text documents on my desktop, save them, then back them up on my Zip disk. Sometimes I have to go back to the original document and make a subsequent change–and then update my Zip back up. I like the larger storage capacity of a CD-RW, but one of the salesmen told me that if I need to update the CD-RW backup file, I will have to re-write the ENTIRE disk–and this takes several minutes. True or False?
IoMega (maker of both Zip drives and CD-RW units) recently ran some newspaper ad claiming that Zip drives are best for text documents and burners for audio/video projects. True or false?
Any technical help you can give would be appreciated. Thank you in advance and have a lovely weekend.
Why would you need to re-write the entire disk? If you saved the document as a new name say bills1 and bills2 it would only take seconds to add to the cd-r or cd-rw, plus you’d be able to preserve the orginal, which is useful.
I’ve never used a zip-drive, because it seems limited in the number of functions it can preform vs a cd-rw. If you think you’ll ever want to do anything besides save documents, I’d suggest the cd-rw. The cds seem much cheaper than the disks(or whatever they are) for zip drives, too.
I’d recommend getting both a CD burner and a ZIP drive, if finances and drive bays allow. The CD-RW has much higher capacity than a ZIP, and also has better access time for read/write – don’t waste your money on both a CD-ROM and CD-RW.
The ZIP cartridge, however, is not prone to getting scratched or broken (though EM fields are bad for them – don’t leave the disk on top of your monitor). It also is essential if you make rescue disks with Norton AntiVirus. Rescue disks, if you don’t know, allow you to start your PC in the event of a serious crash.
The salesmen’s claim that you’d have to rewrite the entire CD is BS. Almost every commercially-available CD-RW ships with a utility that allows you to use the drive just like it was a great big floppy disk.
CDRW’s have more overall utility but the ZIP disk can be written to more quickly and easily overall without the necessity of running the applet necessary to mount and un-mount the CDRW disk pretending to be a disk drive.
You can get an internal 100 meg IDE ZIP disk for around
$ 50. or so and ZIP disks are $6-$9 typically . A Plextor 16X CDRW can be had for around 200 and CDRW disks are usually 2- 3 each (or less).
I’ve got both a zip drive and a CD-RW drive on my computer. Mostly, I do my backups to the zip drive because it is faster and more convenient. I wrote a batch file that uses XCOPY commands to copy only files that have a newer date stamp. So a backup goes really fast. That wouldn’t work with a CD. It sounds like you already have a zip drive. Unless there’s a capacity problem I’d stick with it.
An example of when I back up to the CD is when I finish doing my taxes in April. A CD is much cheaper than a zip cartridge and if I need to read files many years from now there’s a better chance of finding a CD reader than a zip drive.
Mostly, I’m using the the CD-RW drive to record LPs onto CDs.
Get the CDRW drive. Two big reasons, and then some.
First, CDRs can be read on practically every computer on this planet, while Zip drives are quite rare by comparison. No big deal if you only want to use the Zip drive at home. But if you ever want to bring your files to school/work/friend’s house/business trip, better plan on bringing your portable Zip drive too.
Second, the price of Zip discs is a joke compared to CDR/CDRW media. Someone said Zip discs are $6-9 these days? Wow. They’ve come down a lot from the $15 they used to be. Still, blank CD media is dirt cheap by comparison. I usually buy CDRs in 10-packs for $5, and those are expensive ones in a really pretty box. In short, you can throw away a whole lot of CDs for the price of a single Zip disc.
And a distant third reason to lean toward the CDRW is the fact that Zip is still magnetic media, susceptable to erasure via strong EM fields. And magnetic media tends to degrade over time all by itself anyway. CDs do too, but much more slowly.
About the only downside to a CDRW drive is the higher initial cost. These last few months I’ve seen them on the market for less than $100. That shouldn’t be too far out of reach for most people.
In most cases the higher capacity, high availability of readers and low media cost means that CD-RW or even old fashioned CD-R (via a burner)are far better choices for archive/backup.
Note also that ZIP is a proprietary format, newer generation devices (e.g. DVD) guarentee backward reading of most formats on the open-standard optical devices like CDs.
One small caveat is that the software that allows you to write file by file, not whole disks at a time MUST be available on the reading machine. Else you must “close” the CD to make it look and act like a normal CD. No big deal, you can reopen the CD for a loss of 25MB, I can’t be bothered to write the decimal place and all those zeros for the cost of this waste!!
However, CD-RW does have an upper limit on how often you can rewrite over a portion of the disk. Normally this is irrelevant, but if you do a lot of edits (i.e. use the CD-RW like a floppy or hard disk) you will eventually run out of usable space.
I have done a lot of recomendations of computer systems. I have only recomendated Zip disks/drives if they have another computer (i.e. work computer) that already use zip disks. Basically their low capacity (compaired to cd format), high cost per disk and propritory format make them the less then favorable choice.
Perhaps if you only plan to buy a small number of zip disks it would be cost effective but you still have lower capacity and propriatory format.
cd-rw don’t have to be entirely rewritten to add/remove a file.
How big are the files you are backing up and how many?
I agree on getting both if you can. One correction though: Zip drives are much faster than CD-RW drives. I would use a Zip disk for regular access and save the CD-RW for backup or archiving.
CD-RWs also have other cool uses. For example, both my car CD player(AIWA CDC-MP3) and my portable CD player (Riovolt) will play CD-RWs with MP3 files on them, so it’s very useful for me to have a CD-RW drive.
If you have an inkling to purchase any type of MP3 CD player in the future (and they are COOL!) you will need a CD-RW drive anyway.
Depends on the Zip drive. Scsi zip just flat out screams. Wonderful things. Parallel port zips…hoo boy…if it’s bigger than a term paper, plan on taking a hour or so…I used to have to restore 100 mb files from a parallel zip and it would take upwards of an hour and a quarter to finish. Oh, the pain. USB is a bit faster. SCSI is downright amazing.
I think it more or less depends on how frequently you need to do the backing up. If you need to stash files daily, go with the Zip. Get a usb or possibly parallel :rolleyes: model so it’s more transportable, if you want to read on other peoples’ systems.
If you have to copy to disk less frequently than once or twice a week, go with the CDR. Sometimes it’s cheaper to use a one-write CDR, backup, and toss it when it’s done. I mean, 30 cents a shot is nothing. Often times you can use CDR’s like kleenex and still save money compared to zip or cdrw.
I’ll also agree with most everyone above and recommend the CDRW.
And yeah the salesperson was dead wrong about adding files to the CDRW taking that long. Even erasing the disk only takes about 30 seconds.
If you want a specific suggestion, I received the TDK VeloCD a while back and I love it. On my old CDR (admittedly very old), I would have at least one failure every 5 burns or so. I’ve probably burned about 100 cds on the new burner without an error yet.
<bragging>My personal recommendation on the CDRW is Plextor. I could actually jump up on down on mine while it’s burning and it still wouldn’t skip</bragging>