Dropped $80 on a used Zip drive and it died after 3 weeks

Found a Zip 250 drive at a thrift store in Phoenix for $80 a month ago. Thought it'd be cool to offload some old files onto the disks I had sitting around. Worked fine for a week then started making that clicking sound of death. Guess that's why nobody uses those things anymore. Anyone else get burned by old storage tech?

2 comments

2 Comments

casey9432d agoMost Upvoted

Had a buddy find a mint condition Zip 100 drive at a garage sale in Tucson for five bucks. He was stoked, brought it home, plugged it in, and it worked exactly once before the motor just seized up. He tried taking it apart to fix it but just ended up with a pile of plastic pieces and a dead drive. So yeah, I feel your pain on that eighty dollar lesson.

tessa_kim32d ago

Did you try smacking it on the side like an old TV? That's what I do with my busted DVD drive and sometimes it works for another five minutes. I feel you though, I spent $50 on a stack of Zip disks from a flea market and half of them were already dead. Guess my backup plan was actually just a way to lose data faster. Now I just toss old files onto a cheap external hard drive and hope for the best.