On Mar 5, 2018, at 9:14 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I'm replying publicly, because ZIP drive technology is actually a pretty good "vintage" resource. SOme people malign ZIP disks and drives. The facts are, PC's and Windows systems used them for quite a long time, you could buy ZIP disks at the office-supply stores well into the 2000's.
Zip 100s are generally pretty reliable; their infamous reliability problems really set in around the second generation, definitely by the time the 250MB version hit. Stick with the boxier 100MB drives and you should be set.
I don't know of much removable storage, that spans Macs and PC's, and can be connected to most Macs and most Windows systems, *and* allow files to move between them. There's Mac-format and PC-format ZIP disks, but old Macs can read either and I think Windows can read either (I forget).
The format is just the filesystem on the disk; Macs can read Windows filesystems, in general, but Windows doesn't come with drivers for HFS or its derivatives (I'm pretty sure there are ones you can install, but I haven't really looked into it). Unlike 400/800k vs. 360/720k floppies, the difference isn't in the low-level disk format; Mac and PC Zip disks are the same aside from the filesystem. This is useful, because Zip drives are standard SCSI drives, which means they're pretty decent hard drive replacements for a lot of vintage machines that can use SCSI. I used (and sometimes, still use) a Zip 100 as the hard drive for my PDP-11/23, since I have a SCSI card for it; a 100 MB hard drive is rather nicely large for RSX-11M, and you can even bootstrap it by building the system image in simh and just dd'ing the simh hard drive image to a Zip drive connected via SCSI, USB or ATAPI to a more modern machine. It's really great. - Dave