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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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
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.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Syquest-SparQ-1-0-Gigabyte-blank-disks-lot-13-BONUS-/270776067389?pt=BI_Blank_Media&hash=item3f0b82e53d
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.
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.
use it for parts.