Zip 250 MB USB External Drive (PC/Mac)

This was the forth one that i purchased. The other three simply did not work. I finally received a new drive and it works great. Very pleased with this drive. Beware of used iomega drives, it's a hit and miss adventure.

This drive does not read any 100mb zip disks A Waste of money

I have a lot of material on Zip drives and the last Zip I order was refurbished and did not work. So far this new one is working well and I am recovering a lot of files that were dormant. Harold King

Bottom Line: This model of Zip Drive is USB plug and play and powers itself off the USB bus on the machine it is connected to. It is a little on the slow side for reading and writing of data due to its age, but will work if you have Zip disks that you still need to use. Buy it used. USB flash and CD R/W storage effective killed these products in the marketplace. I had some old files I needed to get access to and a stack of Zip 100 and Zip 250 disks that were the best candidates. A couple of desktops ago I had an internal Zip drive, and had been been lugging that machine around from place to place in case I needed it. Finally I opted to let that machine go to free up space, so recently when I decided to move those files onto newer storage I had to pick up a drive. I was very surprised to see that the price for one of these drives is still well over $100 new in 2014. The device I bought was a little under $40 new after shipping was added on, for about an hour of two or use. It gets three stars for being adequate, if outdated, technology. Recommend to borrow the drive if you can find a person who has one, or else buy it used.

The zip drive runs fine, but apparently my Mac OS 9.20 Software is a little too far along for the zip drive. As a result, I cannot get it to "read" the 100 MB discs. Drat !

It is replacing a similar USB External Drive that has lasted many years. As a result it was very easy to install and, hopefully, will last several more years. We have stored a lot of information on the Zip Disks and rely on having a reader available to use them, if and when they are required.

Using this was confusing at first, but I quickly rectified the issue. There are two instances in which you will get a seriously annoying error trying to access the disk. 1) If a disk is bad 2) If you click on the mounted drive For #2 -- you are not supposed to click on the mounted drive, as this is simply a reference to the fact that the drive has been mounted at all. There will be a *second* entry that pops up -- that lists the volume label of the media you have inserted into that drive. Please access it using that-- do not click on the mounted drive entry :) If you click on the volume label only to get an error, this means your disk is bad. Now, a bad disk does not necessarily mean "totally unaccessible" just as a bad hard drive does not necessarily mean that, either. Sometimes a zip disk will access under one operating system, but not another -- when it is going bad. It also depends upon the file system you are using. If your zip disk is formatted in the FAT16 / FAT32 Formats -- all OSes should read it fine. If it is in NTFS -- only Microsoft Windows (and unix, linux, etc distros which properly use the NTFS driver) will be able to see it. If it is formatted under Linux and you need to see this in Microsoft Windows -- you will need to Google for and Download a utility called EXT2FS. Be warned -- though they claim it works fine under Vista, it breaks hard under Vista. XP and lower only, please :)

Not only did this Zip drive not open on my PC; it ate a zip drive that I bought the device to recover, because the eject button doesn't work. I can't get my data out now. This is the worse example of abuse and fraud I've seen on Bezos's Amazon. I now have to return the device with my zip drive in it, because I can't get it out without breaking it open...Thanks and f u to Mr. G. in Pompano Beach.