SyQuest EzDrive 135, is it worth it?
I got one of these SyQuest EzDrive 135 things, its kind of like a floppy drive except it uses hard disks instead of plastic sheets.
with it i got 2 135mb disks, and i was wondering, is it even worth it to try and use it?
its a scsi drive so i would need an adapter card to use it, but im just wondering, even though it is a interesting thing, would it even be worth it to try and use it? are there any practical uses for it?
i was thinking i could put a few songs on each disk or maybe pictures but thats about it.
with it i got 2 135mb disks, and i was wondering, is it even worth it to try and use it?
its a scsi drive so i would need an adapter card to use it, but im just wondering, even though it is a interesting thing, would it even be worth it to try and use it? are there any practical uses for it?
i was thinking i could put a few songs on each disk or maybe pictures but thats about it.
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I liked SyQuest they had a good product at a good price. The EzDrive was the rival of Iomega ZIP. But SyQuest's had more capacity and worked better. I went for the Sparq Drive which was a one gig removable drive. It also had an IDE interface which made it pretty fast and it cost a lot less than the Iomega Jazz. I bought a bunch of them from Egghead when they decided to liquidate their brick stores and had an online auction running. I still have a case of brand new disks and several brand new drives. I didn't anticipate USB drives getting as big as they have. Back then a USB 16 meg or 32 meg stick was pricey, so Sparq was the best way to store stuff and they had metal platters, They were removable hard drives. For those of us who used this stuff it was exciting times. Hard drives were really expensive, I still remember buying my first 3.2 gig drive and paying $350.00 for it. So these drives played an important part. Now we have microdrives and USB flash and even the Mini flash SD that has more capacity than a case of SparQ drives.
So they are collectors items now, the fun stuff we used to play with. They filled a niche need and worked but the niche is gone, Syquest went bankrupt, Iomega almost did too because of their rebate scandal and the class action lawsuit that resulted. Commander Keen, one of the funnest games there was fit on a 1.4 meg floppy. Now thats not enough space for a couple of high res pictures. Did you know that some of the earliest digital cameras used floppys to store the pictures.?
Anyway, in answer to the question, the drives are now to small and to slow to be of any practical value. As a learning tool they would be good. They are a part of the very short history of PC's. You can archive stuff to them if you want but they won't hold much by today's standards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_EZ_135_Drive
So they are collectors items now, the fun stuff we used to play with. They filled a niche need and worked but the niche is gone, Syquest went bankrupt, Iomega almost did too because of their rebate scandal and the class action lawsuit that resulted. Commander Keen, one of the funnest games there was fit on a 1.4 meg floppy. Now thats not enough space for a couple of high res pictures. Did you know that some of the earliest digital cameras used floppys to store the pictures.?
Anyway, in answer to the question, the drives are now to small and to slow to be of any practical value. As a learning tool they would be good. They are a part of the very short history of PC's. You can archive stuff to them if you want but they won't hold much by today's standards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_EZ_135_Drive
Jul 8, 2011. 11:04 AMzack247 (author)
says:
i was reading the wikipedia entry when i got the thing, it seems like a interesting device but yu guys are right, it is probably better to strip it for parts, i suppose theres not as much practicality in this thing as i thought.
Jul 8, 2011. 3:14 PMorksecurity
says:
The Iomega Jazz was significantly more impressive than the Zip -- larger storage AND much faster data transfer; it really did approach the speed of the "real" hard disks of the time.
Still not particularly useful now unless you already have a system that's relying on these, in which case you probably want to stash away an extra drive or two so you aren't dead in the water when your current drive dies.
One of the basic principles of computing as an industry: Data and computation expands to consume the resources available to it.
Still not particularly useful now unless you already have a system that's relying on these, in which case you probably want to stash away an extra drive or two so you aren't dead in the water when your current drive dies.
One of the basic principles of computing as an industry: Data and computation expands to consume the resources available to it.
Check this out. Its a bunch of SparQ disks.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Syquest-SparQ-1-0-Gigabyte-blank-disks-lot-13-BONUS-/270776067389?pt=BI_Blank_Media&hash=item3f0b82e53d
http://cgi.ebay.com/Syquest-SparQ-1-0-Gigabyte-blank-disks-lot-13-BONUS-/270776067389?pt=BI_Blank_Media&hash=item3f0b82e53d
Jul 9, 2011. 1:24 AMzack247 (author)
says:
wow that looks like theyre quite cheap :P
its kind of interesting to see how technology has change over the last decade or so, back when the EZ135 or even the SparQ were used that was state of the art and you had to be somebody to own one, reminds me of my powerbook 190, its a interesting machine, and had plenty of practical uses when it was popular, but now its just a old, practically useless 5 pound laptop with a greyscale screen.
its kind of interesting to see how technology has change over the last decade or so, back when the EZ135 or even the SparQ were used that was state of the art and you had to be somebody to own one, reminds me of my powerbook 190, its a interesting machine, and had plenty of practical uses when it was popular, but now its just a old, practically useless 5 pound laptop with a greyscale screen.
Jul 8, 2011. 9:11 AMorksecurity
says:
Given the price on multi-gigabyte flash drives these days, it's really hard to justify investing effort in anything much smaller than a gig.
I agree with Frollard: Either scavenge for parts, or toss it onto your "archaic computer collection" shelf if you can't think of anything useful to extract from it, or put it out on Freecycle -- someone might be desperately looking for one of these in order to recover some old backups or to keep an old system running a bit longer.
I agree with Frollard: Either scavenge for parts, or toss it onto your "archaic computer collection" shelf if you can't think of anything useful to extract from it, or put it out on Freecycle -- someone might be desperately looking for one of these in order to recover some old backups or to keep an old system running a bit longer.
Jul 8, 2011. 11:07 AMzack247 (author)
says:
yea now that i think about it maybe it will be better for parts
Jul 8, 2011. 11:07 AMzack247 (author)
says:
the disk spindle motor seems interesting, and there is a lot of switches in the drive, maybe there are even a few IC's i can reuse, who knows.
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