User avatar
leighb2282

Posted Wed Jan 03, 2018 8:46 pm

Hey Folks, small haul to record today, tried out a new location to see if they had some Amiga stuff or items of interest at lunch today (place is Weird Stuff warehouse in sunnyvale, ca) and I managed to get a small but significant haul.
haul1.JPG
Probably the best find was a copy of AmigaTEX including all disks and manuals in what looks like pretty much mint condition, all for only $3! I haven't tried out the integrity of the disks yet but here's hoping they are still good!

Second thing was a Zip250 External SCSI drive (with adapter) I grabbed a few zip100 disks and what I thought was teh right cable but I guessed wrong, I now have the right cable ordered from good old ebay so hopefully i'll have some luck with getting that up and running as a backup drive (I plan to only use Zip100 disks in it)

FInally I grabbed an empty floppy drive caddy as I know that I will need overflow storage for all the random floppy disks i'm bound to end up with.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Jan 03, 2018 9:48 pm

Nice! I am pretty sure I've seen a guy hook up his Zip drive as a boot disk, which kind of blew my mind at the time. Zips are a really great storage device - at least they used to be. I always felt they were far more stable than Jazz. I used Zip disks in art school to save my 3D animations.... man, I had STACKS of them, it was so ridiculous.

But IIRC they were 100MB per disk or something fantastic like that. For Amiga Data? That's gigantic! I should pull my old Zip drive out of storage and see if I can get it working, too. Oh man... I'll be super lucky to even find the power cord for it. Hah!

I'm not familiar with AmigaTeX. I'll have to look that up. Kind of unbelievable you found old Amiga software at a place like that!

User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Fri Jan 05, 2018 10:49 pm

Cool find for Weird Stuff Warehouse. I have been in there a few times and only managed to find some DSDD floppy disks and some misc. Mac stuff. Hopefully the disks still work. But for $3 its a no brainer.
intric8 wrote:Nice! I am pretty sure I've seen a guy hook up his Zip drive as a boot disk, which kind of blew my mind at the time. Zips are a really great storage device - at least they used to be. I always felt they were far more stable than Jazz. I used Zip disks in art school to save my 3D animations.... man, I had STACKS of them, it was so ridiculous.
Great idea. I have a SCSI Zip Drive still in the box that I was using for Mac stuff but now I think I will try it out with the 2000. I know this 2000 used to be hooked up to a SyQuest 88MB, which I also have but ZIP disks would be so much more convenient. I second the JAZZ disk reliability. I found one in a thrift store a while back looked brand new. While I could initially get it to work and it seemed fine at first none of the disks wanted to format all had errors it couldn't recover. I even bought a new sealed 3 pack and NONE of them worked. Yet the drive passed all diagnostics. I got irritated with it and threw the whole lot in the bin. "Aint nobody got time for that"
But IIRC they were 100MB per disk or something fantastic like that. For Amiga Data? That's gigantic! I should pull my old Zip drive out of storage and see if I can get it working, too. Oh man... I'll be super lucky to even find the power cord for it. Hah!
I hope you try it out. I would love to see a write up on that. I have a ton of 100MB and 250MB disks, mostly with Mac/PC stuff on them and quite a few new disks. If I can get to my Amiga stuff (Still trying to unpack) then I can try it out.

User avatar
leighb2282

Posted Sun Jan 07, 2018 12:47 am

I got the Zip drive hooked up and it works pretty good, it doesn't seem to hot-swap like a floppy disk does however - you have to have it inserted in the drive at boot otherwise it doesn't see the disk, 100MiB disks gets formatted at 95MiB.

I count myself really lucky finding the amigaTex, it was in with all the other binders of stuff in the back area and it was pure luck that I actually saw it on my second pass through the area.

This was the ONLY SCSI zip drive there was, there was a bunch of jazz drives and other assorted syquest and iomega external drives from back in the day and a butt-ton of parralel zip drives but this was the only SCSI version, i'm also curious at how well it'll handle 250MiB disks as well as the 100MiB disks.
Zippy Zapp wrote:Cool find for Weird Stuff Warehouse. I have been in there a few times and only managed to find some DSDD floppy disks and some misc. Mac stuff. Hopefully the disks still work. But for $3 its a no brainer.
intric8 wrote:Nice! I am pretty sure I've seen a guy hook up his Zip drive as a boot disk, which kind of blew my mind at the time. Zips are a really great storage device - at least they used to be. I always felt they were far more stable than Jazz. I used Zip disks in art school to save my 3D animations.... man, I had STACKS of them, it was so ridiculous.
Great idea. I have a SCSI Zip Drive still in the box that I was using for Mac stuff but now I think I will try it out with the 2000. I know this 2000 used to be hooked up to a SyQuest 88MB, which I also have but ZIP disks would be so much more convenient. I second the JAZZ disk reliability. I found one in a thrift store a while back looked brand new. While I could initially get it to work and it seemed fine at first none of the disks wanted to format all had errors it couldn't recover. I even bought a new sealed 3 pack and NONE of them worked. Yet the drive passed all diagnostics. I got irritated with it and threw the whole lot in the bin. "Aint nobody got time for that"
But IIRC they were 100MB per disk or something fantastic like that. For Amiga Data? That's gigantic! I should pull my old Zip drive out of storage and see if I can get it working, too. Oh man... I'll be super lucky to even find the power cord for it. Hah!
I hope you try it out. I would love to see a write up on that. I have a ton of 100MB and 250MB disks, mostly with Mac/PC stuff on them and quite a few new disks. If I can get to my Amiga stuff (Still trying to unpack) then I can try it out.

User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Sun Jan 07, 2018 9:25 am

My SCSI ZIP Drive is only 100MB and my ZIP 250MB drives are all IDE so I can't test the 250MB with Amiga. At least not on the 2000. I would expect if you have a SCSI 250MB ZIP drive and 250MB ZIP disks it would work well.

Was there ever an application or device library or something for the ZIP drive for Amiga? Then it might support hot swap?

Ok, I found this:

http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/Z100

I am not in a position to try it out but it is worth a shot.





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