zip 100 drives

flamegrill

does anyone else find the parralell zip 100 drives very slow with new computers. with my old p200mmx i could copy a zip disk to my hd in about 2 or 3 minutes, now with my new computer it takes like 20 minutes or more. i have the drivers installed and the tools and iv run the parralell port accelerator that come swith the zip drive. if anyone has nay ideads please let me know, as this is very distressing as the computer becomes unuseable while im coping to and from the drive..

cheerz
flamegrill

Kali

I've both an external parallel zip drive and an internal.. the parallel is always the exact same transfer speed on all pcs i use it on (e.g. about 20 minutes like you said) .. I've never seen an external one copy an entire disk in 2 minutes, perhaps the SCSI model.

po0k

I might be able to lay my hans on a Zip 100 ext drive.
it was used on a PowerMac, so it has aSCSi port. Will this drive work on a parallel?
I have an old Adaptec ISA scsi card. It has no backplane , only one internal 50-pin connector.
Can I hook up the Zip to it? I don't mind a bit of sauldering and it could be hanging out of the back of the case for all I care, but 20mins for 100 megs is crap.
Any help would be much appreciated.

_CreeD_

The problem AFAIK is that most new motherboards (And intel boards for years) only emulate EPP/ECP modes, they're software driven. The last one I remember having that was nice and fast (Yup, a disk in 2/3 minutes was not impossible) was a Chaintech BX board with a Celeron300. Decent parallel ports just aren't worth the investment now that USB has finally taken off.

Kali

ouch didn't realise that, obviously a little chip dedicated to an ageing standard that (Intel anyway) want to move away from wouldn't make much sense.
still I rarely use the external zip anymore anyway

Gerry

I wasnt aware that it was all done in software, but think about it. Even if it was, the disk would still get copied in 5-6 minutes, as a modern cpu is well capable of emulating a fast ecp parallel port. I'd check the bios settings for the parallel port, and make sure it is actually on ecp.
Also, you can still buy bx boards. (!)

Jademan

Count yourself lucky mate, i have used a zip parallel for 5 years, 100mb takes 15 minutes which was fine 5 years ago but dame slow now!
I am now using an external scsi and a atapi internal all 100mb models.

scsi/atapi 2-3 mins 100mb

A suggestion is to make sure the parellel port mode is set to EPP 1.7/1.9 if avalible.

[NOTE] using zip 100 disks in a zip250 drive is slower than using 250 disks.

_CreeD_

I know you'd think a fast CPU would do the trick but it doesn't, it really is down to the cheap ass parallel ports they're using. It's not even a chipset factor, so BX itself won't gaurantee decent speed, it depends on the port they popped onto it.