In the process of decluttering my life, I’m trying to ditch some computer gear of the type every closet geek probably has laying around.
Among the stuff I have is an internal IDE Iomega Zip drive and about 15 discs. Should I just toss it all? Are Zips still in common use anywhere?
I could put everything up on Craigslist, but then I’d have to take photos, deal with people stopping by to check them out but possibly not buy, scam emails, and so on.
I tossed all mine recently when I moved, they’re worthless IMO. Try Freecycle, less hassle than Craig’s List.
I threw out all mine about 3 months ago when I moved. They had been sitting in a box for at least 7 years by that point. It was time to let go. With it went two USR modems and a couple of 3.5" floppy drives (won’t use them again, either).
I still have my 200 MB SyQuest drive, a Zip drive, several disks for each… I even have one of those 120MB “Superdisk” drives that were compatible with floppies, remember those? (That was included as a freebie when I bought a used auxiliary computer years ago).
I did sell the Floptical though.
Given that you can get a 2 gig usb stick for roughly the price of lunch, I think you can safely throw away the Zip drive.
Keep it another decade or so and nostalgic nerds will bid $1,000s for it. Unfortunately the $10,000 you get for it won’t pay for a tank of gas.
I still have a couple 80 MB SyQuests. I really am curious as to what’s on them. I suspect that I will never find out. 
I have my family history stuck on them, and no drive, so I’m stuck lugging them around until I get around to putting them on a CD. I think my Dad has an external drive I can use for that.
You could probably find a drive on eBay. I’d put my Zip drive and disks on eBay, but there’s already tens of them that are going begging.
Maybe I’ll go the Craigslist free stuff path rather than shipping it off to the landfill.
Don’t Zip drives have a nasty habit of going pop and then all your data is gone? I ask sincerely, because I’m not very computer literate.
My computer, bought in 1999, came with one and as luck would have it, there were zip drives on all the computers in college. It was very handy before USB keys came along. The discs did sometimes die but I don’t know if they died at anything like the rate of floppies before them.
There were models that could do that, but it was fixed. But no one is suggesting that ZIP drives are useful as storage or backup today. The size of the drives is way too small to compete with something as simple and cheap as a USB thumb drive.
I have an external Zip drive and a metric shitload of disks with mostly picture files on them. One of these days (weeks) I’m going to connect it to my desktop and transfer it all to my hard drive so I can sort everything and then probably burn everything I want to keep onto CD-ROMs. At one time I’d thought that after I did that I was going to sell the drive and the (reformatted) disks on eBay, but like elmwood said there seems to be more sellers than buyers for them these days.
Except then I’d have to find a computer old enough to have the giant SCSI connector on it. It’s a never ending cycle.
Ah, how far we’ve come in just 10 years.
Not only do I have extra ZIP drives, I have them in all-but-obsolete connections: 100MB drives (not the later 250MB ones), one with a parallel port (printer) connection and the other with a SCSI port.
In addition to a US Robotics 54.6k baud external modem rattling around somewhere, I also still have in my closet a 128K ISDN modem, which requires two separate phone lines in order to do “two-channel bonding” to reach that speed of connectivity. Yee-ha!
Also, 72-pin SIMM memory chips. I think most of them are 64MB but some may be 16MB SIMMs, maybe even 4MB!
And finally, the king of obsoletion, a 16-bit ISA SoundBlaster clone sound card. Just about all motherboards made in the past 6 years come with an equal or better sound chip soldered on as a freebie port.
There’s no reason ever to throw out any non-optical storage devices for computers. They’ll be worth money as collector’s items in the future.
Heh!
I’ll see you and raise you a Nubus non-accelerated RGB video card good enough for 8 bit color at 640 x 480. With an Apple-proprietary DB-15 monitor port, not a VGA port, by the way.
I sold my old Zip drive and about a dozen disks on eBay. Can’t remember what I made, but it was enough to buy lunch with. Maybe dinner.
I’ve got an internal Zip drive at home I still need to put up for auction.
That’s mine…100MB with a parallel port. And I know my desktop has a parallel port, because for a while I had the ZIP drive connected to it, with the printer plugged into the back of the ZIP drive.