pictures taken with a Mavica CD400
What a peculiar looking drive! Eschewing the "slightly fun industrial" design of iomega's own Zip drives, VST went whole hog and made this Zip drive look like something you'd find in a gamer's rig in the early to mid 2000s - although, if it's a gamer we're talking about, you'd probably more likely find the external hard drives VST sold in a near-identical shell.
This was apparently part of some ecosystem VST tried to push for a brief moment, notice the big ol' bumps on the top and bottom, perfect for aligning stacked drives. The wavey design would also probably offer pretty secure stacking. Given I can hardly find any information or pictures of these things online outside of forum posts talking about it, I assume this ecosystem didn't last long.
But I do love how quirky and impeccably Y2K it is. The giant yellow FireWire logo on the top and the plain black text stating "FireWire Zip Drive" on the front stick out to me as the funniest parts. My unit appears quite roughed up (much of the text on the bottm has become illegible) but despite looking like scratched up decayed rubberized coating, I detect no stickiness or anything that would tell me it was. Feels just like regular hard plastic, just real scratched up for some reason!
As a Zip drive... it works! To get it to show up in Windows 7, I had to force Windows to use its legacy FireWire driver, because Windows broke FireWire a long time ago, but it did show up! It would definitely play nicer with an XP or earlier machine, or - VST's target demographic - an era-appropriate Mac! That's actually the main reason I bought this, for data transfer to old Macs - or at least, that was a suitable enough to excuse to feed my addiction.
One of the most interesting parts of this drive is actually its power supply situation. You'll notice in the 4th attached picture the 12V DC jack. This is oddly high - most Zip drives iomega ever made only needed 5V to run, and usually at 1A, sometime even .5A! Why such high power needs?
Well, probably because, if I'm correct, this is just a desktop ATAPI drive in a shell with a FireWire adapter plugged into it. Remember that VST was also selling hard drives in this same chassis. I've seen pictures of those open - it's just an ATAPI to FireWire adapter board inside. ATAPI devices generally require 12V power, so it makes sense this one does if that is indeed what's inside. This also means, coincidentally, that the 12V power supplies for my IDE-to-USB adapters, which I've posted about before, happen to have the exact right barrel jack to plug right into these, and the drive runs flawlessly off of them. What luck!
But what's even more interesting is that FireWire supported sending 12V over the connection. And one of the selling points of this drive is that you can power it entirely off of FireWire! So, besides the USB-Powered iomega drives (which I have had bad experiences with), this is probably one of the only external Zip drives you can get that doesn't require a wall-wart to run. Now, if you're connecting this to a laptop with the tiny 4-pin connector, you'll still need to provide your own power, given the main difference between the standard 6-pin connector and the 4-pin connector was... the removal of the 2 power pins. But like I said, I've already got that problem sorted, and this drive will mostly be used with my iMac G4 anyways, which does provide power over FireWire.
Now, something I want to experiment with at some point is... if I connect this to my laptop, using the AC adapter to provide 12V power... can I then add another device to the chain that will piggyback off the power going to the Zip drive? Will definitely have to tinker with that sort of nonsense sometime...
But yeah. Cool drive. Now I need to get one or two Zip 250 disks, just for shits and giggles.