NY  wrote:
> "Computer Nerd Kev"  wrote in message
>>
>> Mine says it only needs 0.5A. Not confident that Zip disks would
>> survive better than SD cards though.
>
> It's scary to think that there was a time when ZIP discs were the best
> portable format, before USB pen drives and SD cards. They were a lot smaller
> and slower than CDs, but had the advantage that the data could be
> selectively overwritten, rather than gradually filling up the disc with
> out-of-date copies of a file and then wiping the whole CD clean and starting
> again.

I just got about 1MB/s reading from one, that's not too bad. About
a third of the speed I get from a CD-R on this PC (a CD drive from
1997, so a period test), and seemingly much faster spin-up and seek
times. They've also proved to have decent long-term data integrity,
which is an area that's a bit unclear with flash memory (and known
to be a problem with burnt CDs).

Using one as the root parition on a Linux system though? No, I
don't think that's wise. Especially compared to flash memory.

At the same time as Zip disks, Iomega also sold Jaz disks which were
based on hard disk technology but with removable platters. I've got
a 1GB Jaz disk here from 1996 (no drive), but I've never actually
used one so I'm not sure what the performance was like. One could
hope for something similar to a real HDD of the era.

Zip:
$ dd if=/dev/sda4 of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10485760 bytes transferred in 10.606341 seconds (988631 bytes/sec)

CDROM including spin-up:
$ dd if=/dev/scd0 of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10485760 bytes transferred in 8.256551 seconds (1269993 bytes/sec)

CDROM already spun-up:
$ dd if=/dev/scd0 of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10485760 bytes transferred in 0.318608 seconds (32911166 bytes/sec)

Mid-90s 2GB IDE Hard Disk:
$ dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10485760 bytes transferred in 1.555667 seconds (6740363 bytes/sec)

Would try a floppy too (for a 1MB read instead of 10MB of course),
but the drive has gone a bit iffy lately. We all know that reading
a MB from one of those took a lot longer than a second though.

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