[Frank Sheed]

Are zip drives now dead? I still have backups stored on zip disks. I would presume the external drives can still be found and installed on a port?

F

[stainlessbanner]

I still have zip/jaz and bernoulli drives. Looks like they have a bunch of drivers available that should do the trick.

[sittnick]

Are zip drives now dead?

You can still buy them. The external USB version is probably the most practical one. When 256MB USB thumb drives went below the price of Zip cartridges, that killed them.

The Iomega Jaz drive is in even worse shape. You can barely even find them on ebay.

But we have survived orphaned 5 1/4" floppies, Iomega Bernoulli Boxes, Coleco Adam Digital Datapack Drives, even the 2.88 MB floppy used in the NeXT machine and supported but rarely used in IBM Thinkpads. Oh, and don't forget all those Magneto-Optical formats and TRS-80 data cassettes (which were just leaderless audio cassettes).

[JeffAtlanta]

Are zip drives now dead? I still have backups stored on zip disks. I would presume the external drives can still be found and installed on a port?

You should probably consider transferring the data off of the zip disks. Zip disks did suffer from the "click of death" - this is when the user hears a clicking sound which heralds the very sudden death of the zip disk.