PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

The Zip250 Drive

When the Zip100 Drive was introduced, its capacity and performance were reasonable for the time. In those days of smaller hard drives, many people could back up their entire hard disks to one or two Zip100 disks. But as the years passed, faster systems with larger and faster hard drives were introduced and newer versions of applications programs continued to generate larger and larger datafiles. Iomega realized that the Zip100 Drive was fast becoming too small and too slow to be useful for many users, so it introduced the Zip250 Drive, which provides more than twice the capacity and somewhat higher performance.

The Zip250 drive has been made in the same interfaces as the Zip100 Drive: ATAPI/IDE, parallel port, SCSI, and USB. Iomega also produces PC Card and FireWire adapters that allow the USB Zip250 Drive to be used with those interfaces. Like the Zip100 Drive, the Zip250 Drive cannot read, write, or boot from standard 1.44 MB diskettes. The Zip250 Drive accepts both Zip100 disks and Zip250 disks, although we’ve found that using Zip100 disks negates the performance benefits of the Zip250 Drive.

The Zip250 Drive uses the same rotation rate as the Zip100 Drive, and provides comparable seek and access times with one exception. The USB Zip250 Drive specifies average seek time as less than 40 ms, noticeably slower than the other models. ATAPI/IDE, parallel port, and SCSI Zip250 Drives specify sustained transfer rates of 1.2 MB/s minimum and 2.4 MB/s maximum, although ...