Say hello to the fourth Zip drive I've purchased in the past two months, the third BROKEN one I've purchased, and officially the fifth broken one I OWN (had two knocking around prior to this, also both broken).
The seller advertised it as "working good" and doesn't accept returns. I paid $45 for this paperweight that goes "ca-clunk ca-clunk" and then throws I/O errors. I thought maybe buying one of the original parallel port drives would yield better results - clearly I was mistaken. This thing is just as dead as almost every other Zip drive I've seen.
I guess the VST FireWire one that works was just a fluke, and these drives must be the most unreliable pieces of trash ever made. That or I'm just extremely unlucky. Or maybe they used to be reliable some long time in the past and they're just all totally kaput now. I don't know, and at this point, I don't care. I've sunk too much time and money into these damn things.
If the seller doesn't accept a return, maybe, maybe I'll open the drive up and see if I can get it working. I saw one forum thread somewhere that said the metal piece actually holding the drive head can become bent, and that will prevent it from being able to enter the disk cavity altogether, and that bending it back into place can make it work just fine again. It's believable this and maybe my Zip 100 USB could have both suffered this during shipping. But I don't have high hopes, and even on that same forum thread, some of the people in the replies said they'd done the same thing and it only made their drives function for a couple of days.
Gonna stop spending money on things for a while after this. I've just got such an awful taste in my mouth from this whole disaster.
