An 8-inch floppy?? Gee, I’ve never really seen one of those. Then again, the early 80s were more than 20 years ago, and I was still tooling around on a TRS-80 back then.
I remember when our family got our first windows machine (a packard bell pentium-1 in early '96 with about a 1 gig hard drive…) we looked around a lot for an installable 5-1/4 floppy drive that would be compatible, since my father had a lot of files in boxes of five-quarters.
If there was a point to this story, I’ve already gotten to it.
Ah, but we had it tough. EVer spend 30 minutes trying to get your tape recorder to work with your VIC-20 so you could save your Lunar Lander high scores?
I hate Zips with a passion. They have always been unreliable for me. I went through THREE zip drives in one year (1999) and decided never to use those pieces of crap again. I have lost so much data on Zip disks and have experienced the infamous “click of death” twice. The only mass storage device I had more problems with was Syquest.
The “click of death” was enough to scare me off of zips and keep me on floppies until USB drives became cheap enough for me. I’ve never experienced one, but hearing about the phenomenon from so many different sources at so many different times was enough to make me leery of the technology.
Plus, floppies have remained cheap. Cheap in both price and value, true, but if I lose one to shoddiness I’m not out more than a buck or so.
From what I understand, it’s the sound the drive makes when the disk has physically failed and must be replaced. I don’t know if it’s possible to retrieve data off of a disk that has clicked its last, but it is certainly difficult.
I’m running an older comp with win me… and whenever I erase the hard drive, then it needs to boot off a floppy before it can install the windows os cd. Think it gets drivers from the floppy to be able to initialize the cd-rom otherwise it won’t be able to access the cd.
They’re still quite big in the music sampling arena. I’ve even got an old External 100mb parallel drive that I use at least once a week from when they first came out. As well as the 6 disks from the same time period. Never a failure yet.
As I sit here using my girlfriend’s laptop (her computer, you pervs) there is a parallel-port zip-100 drive not eight inches to my right. I reinstalled the software for it on her machine yesterday, on the assumption that she’d gradually transfer off the contents of her ~30 zip disks using the wonders of modern CD-writer technology. At the time I bought the drive for her (used, at an auction of the assets of a failed computer graphics design company, circa 1995) she needed it for school projects and whatnot and even after she transfers her own files, occasionally a client will send material on a zip drive.
Personally, I think we were all better off with punchcards.
According to the website on the Click of Death, it seems that the initial batches of Zip drives were okay until iOmega started slacking off on the quality. All I know is that every single Zip drive I’ve bought lasted me less than 6 months before breaking. Every single one (three, as I mentioned before.) Perhaps iOmega took noticed and improved later models? I don’t know. Or perhaps I am just incredibly unlucky.
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And most hard drives can fit into the same bay as a 3.5 floppy, so that’s probably the simplest and most useful thing to put in there. But you will need a new panel over that hole in the case.
