At 10:48 PM 02/24/2001 Linda Hendren wrote:
>I appreciate the replies re the zip and orb drives.
>Right now (may change my mind tomorrow!!) I've decided to go with the Orb
>mainly because of the size of the disks.  I think the pros and cons are
>about even between the 2. I've used CD-Rs and CD-RWs.  Lost data on the
>CD-Rs and have heard the
>CD-RWs are no more reliable.  I prefer to be able to overwrite or delete the
>files which can't be done on the CD-R. I really think the most reliable is
>the good old 1.44 disk.  LOL


Linda:

If you like 1.44 floppies, I recommend you get a LS-120 Super Drive, 120MB.
About $60 wholesale for the drive and $7 per disk. Also gives you a B:
drive for those occasional floppy to floppy transfers. I think a LS120
works better than a Zip. Never used an Orb.

Right now I've been using an external USB hard drive (20GB for $199). Large
enough to carry more than I need at the moment. Works fine but slowly (a
2GB AVI file takes about 35 mins), though faster than a ZIP or a LS-120.
Only problem is the lack of USB support on NT4 machines at work (but these
are networked so I can move things over from a Win98 PC -- and Win2000 is
in the pipeline). It doesn't fit into a shirt pocket like a floppy but it's
smaller than a laptop, and more or less hot swappable.

Firewire external drives are faster but I don't have Firewire ports in all
of my PCs. There's a nice $150 firewire external drive kit that lets you
use any IDE drive you want to install into it. I was think about getting a
PCMIA firewire card, but then I'd have to mount PCMIA slots in the desktops.

I used to use removable hard drive in caddies to swap between machines but
we've switched from the 4-bay Gateway towers to 2-bay Dell desktops (CDROM
takes one, leaves only one). Also third party machines are unlikely to have
removable drive bays in them.

SCSI external drives are nice but I have different ports on different PCs
and different cables. The parallel SCSI adapters are slow and need
different drivers.

Removable media drives like zips, syquests, LS120s, Orbs, jaz drives really
don't make much sense unless you are going to give away or risk losing the
media. At > 20 cents, a blank CDR is cheaper than a floppy.

Might think about dragging along a laptop, too....

Regards,

John Chin

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