> The Zip drive is taking over the 3.5" disk
> drive's position as a medium to transfer small
> amounts of data between computers. With today's
> file sizes, a 3.5" disk is very quickly filled > to the brim, and many files you typically would
> want to take with you (pictures or mp3 files or
> whatever) won't even fit on one. Also, files
> that small are nowadays more easily transferred
> via e-mail.

I *knew* there was a reason why I wanted a ZIP drive. This is it. It took me well over TEN 3.5" floppies to transfer the piddling amount of data that I needed from my old PC to the new one, and I probably spent over half an hour doing it. If I had a ZIP, I could have done it in one pass and in a considerably smaller amount of time.

> However, as the 3.5" disks, the Zip disks are a
> bit slow and unreliable. You should, in my
> opinion, NEVER trust Zip disks with backup
> data. I've had a couple of disks screw
> themselves up completely out of the blue.

You think ZIP disks are bad? Did you ever have to use one of those old Scitex drives? The disks were fat monsters, and only held about 50 megabytes. Not to mention costing like $25 a disk. I had to use one my junior year in college, and the blasted thing didn't even last two semesters.

> Sending out Zip drives and not having them
> returned would soon become expensive.

Oh dear. Maybe that's why my whole group got sacked. We used ZIP disks almost exclusively to send files to the printer, and almost never got them back. I imagine we were quite expensive to the company that way.