Need help finding a ZIP drive

[Lasher13]

A relative of mine passed away recently and his friend sent me some data to look at through the mail, she said the data was floppy disks, but apparently these floppy disks are HUGE and no way will they fit in my floppy drive.. Unfortunately I don't have one of these drives, and I don't have the money to travel to his place to use his drive to uncover the data.

The discs read as follows "iomega Zip 100 MB"

I did some research and I have found that this is the drive I am looking for Iomega Online Store Item - USB-Powered to read the data off of these disks. It is what I need, but unfortunately for me it is out of stock.

Does anybody know a different brand or a different place to get a drive like this? (please take this into consideration and no offense, but I hate ebay)

[EXreaction]

They are not cheap...
Newegg.com - zip, Backup Drives, Backup Devices & Media

On ebay it looks like they were going for about $20.

[Lasher13]

Thanks Ex, from that page you gave me, it looks like I want the iomega 31310, i searched iomega 31310 on ebay and found it for 39.99 + 9.99 S+H. I saw what you meant by some zip drives being like 20.00, but most of them were parrallel ports and some of the USB ones at that price wouldn't write on the 100MB disks.


But now I wonder if they are compatible with Vista?


LOL when she sent me these Zip drives I actually tried to stick one in my floppy slot. I wasn't paying attention and I struggled with it for a few minutes, it just wouldn't go in, than I really had to look at it, and that's when I noticed the size difference and said "hey this isn't gonna fit".

[ShyguyXPC]

actually I think I have one, one of the older original models that plugs into the floppy drive port (or maybe it was one of the IDE connections, I forget?) on a motherboard (one of the internal drives), remember buying one used for $10 many years ago & sticking in an old PC to try out, just never used it for anything LOL...

would have to see if I can find it, but if I can, I don't have any problem giving it away for free (as long as its in the lower 48 states) , its useless to me. if interested?

[ShyguyXPC]

otherwise doing a quick search on google I came up with this link:

Iomega Zip 100 Internal IDE Drive (Apple/HP/IBM/Compaq branded) - Z100ATAPI for $9.95 | WeirdStuff Warehouse

also checked another source, one I've bought from in past (478 pin Pentium M, a couple of Laptop CDRW drives, etc)

http://www.pcsurplusonline.com/viewprod.cfm?ID=1960 (Sites pages load almost unbearably slow many times, but they do load)

[BipolarBill]

The ATAPI versions are dirt cheap.

Whatever you're going to do, do it fast. Zip disks are a horror show and fail like crazy.