Iomega Zip 250 MB USB External Drive (PC/Mac)

I believe this is a better alternative to the USB drive and much better than a floppy disk drive. I have one at home in my desktop and another I use at work to backup important files. I don't have to worry about loosing it since it is big and it is very durable.

My Zip 250 USB sat in a drawer, unused, for about four years. Plugged it in today, and got the Click Of Death. Thanks, Iomega! It was brilliant of you to design a gizmo that has NO MANUAL EJECT. Drive dies, disc is stuck, and there's no way to pop it out. Argh.

This is what happaned when I tried to use this drive on an otherwise stable Windows 2000 system:

The Iomega Tools installer demanded an immediate restart as soon as it completed.

The system hung on restart and had to be power-cycled.

A new item called 'active disk' appeared in the system tray on successful restart. There was nothing indicating it had anything to do with Iomega at all.

The Iomega entry on the Programs menu had nothing in it but a couple of web links ('help' and 'update').

I was able to read a pre-recorded Zip disk with no problems, however, when I tried to eject the disk (using the right-click menu item), Windows flung a bunch of panicked popups, yelling at me for disconnecting hardware without going through the "safely disconnect hardware" interface -- it basically acted as though I'd unceremoniously yanked out the USB cable while the drive was still spinning. Then it vomited up one of those always-delightful "Unrecognized exception" error popups, and promptly hung.

When I used this drive with an OSX system, every time I tried to eject a disk, the drive spun for over a minute before spitting out the disk.

This is all mysterious. I never had these kinds of problems with the SCSI Zip drives.

In any case, at $10 a pop, the Zip media format has been effectively eclipsed by writable CDs and DVDs.

I've got my Zip 250-USB running on a 1Ghz Pentium 3 with Windows ME and had no trouble getting it installed. Have not had any system locks, either. It's much faster than my old Zip 100 that ran on the parallel port, though the 250-USB reads Zip 100 disks with no problem (though slower than 250 disks). I'm using Iomega's Quik Sync back-up software and it's great to have it operating automatically in the background, without me having to remember to do it.

When I bought mine, the USB-powered version was not yet available, so mine uses an AC power adapter. The USB-powered version would be nice to have for running on my laptop.

Do you like really slow, worthless drives that crash your computer and corrupt your data? Do you enjoy spending hours on hold waiting for someone at technical support to pick up? Do you like wasting hours reinstalling software that is filled with bugs? Do you like losing work because aback up system hasn't worked properly? If so you'll love Iomega products. Spare yourself hours of misery and much regret and buy something else, anything else but don't buy this miserable piece of crap.