Latitude D Series Zip Drive
On the internet and all over any documentation, this does not exist.
This is an Iomega 250 Zip drive made specifically for the D series media bay.
Interestingly, the D600 was released in 2003, the same year Iomega discontinued the Zip. This implies Iomega had the specs prior to the release of the D600 as an authorized accessory producer, and produced it in limited quantities to see how well they would sell. This is considering how well the C series bay drive sold.
Likely a last-ditch effort to try and keep up the Zip specification. Nonetheless, it looks like it didn't succeed and production was stopped likely with the discontinuation of the Zip. Never to be heard about again.
Absolutely no information, nothing on dell forums, nothing on any search engine. Like I said, they don't exist online.
Moving to the actual hardware, it works quite well. The servo motors for the slider and push out mechanisms are louder than a USB zip drive. But the servo moving the data cookie sound like an old CDRom drive.
The D600 treats it like a floppy in terms of boot. If there's an active partition on the disc, the D600 will try to boot from it incorrectly, resulting in the infinite blinking dash or a disc error. Windows, however, treats it like any other Zip drive.
Read/Write is slightly faster than a regular usb Zip drive. Most likely using the extra data lanes the media bay provides in addition to usb.
If anyone else may have some knowledgeable input about Iomega and this specific drive, please comment. I'd like to know a little more (if anyone knows) about the story and better reasoning for production of this drive.
I also found an ebay listing for one of these drives. Notice how everything points to it being a drive for the C series, except the picture on the box label. Everything else (documentation, software, text labels) corresponds to a C series drive.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/192940694987?ViewItem=&item=192940694987
I spoke with the seller, and he said he acquired a few from an auction at University of North Caroline Greensboro. Seems like Iomega targeting institutions where D series laptops would gain a foothold and where easy transfer of reasonable size files among students and faculty would matter?
Comments
I might have to order one of these for my D630. Have you tried it with a 100MB disk? I have only 100MB disks.
Zip250 drives are backwards compatible, so yeah they'd work.
750s can only read (and not write to) 100s, but this isn't a 750.
Awfully strange choice on Iomega's part not to make it a 750.
Interesting that the listing for it is completely gone. It's been less than 5 months and there is no mention of it anywhere, not even a sold listing. This site supposedly has them, or at least it looks like them. I'm going to fill out the quote request form and see what they say
Yeah, I asked the seller and he sold like 25 of them out like hotcakes. Apparently there is still a large enough community of D series laptop owners who want to be able to read their old 250 disks straight from the computer.
Anyways, I bought one from him as a spare because the one I have has been in service a little more than 15 years.
Here's the box, so you know what to look for:
You can see the box label is pretty much unchanged from the CP version, they just slapped the picture for the D series drive. I haven't opened it yet, and I don't remember what mine came with. But I'd assume everything the CP one comes with but just a different drive.
If times get tough, I may be persuaded to give this one up as I still have a working one in my laptop.
EDIT:
I actually stumbled on that listing by chance. I was searching up whatever terms I could think of related to this drive to see if I could find better software, and using some numbers and codes I found on an old Amazon listing and on some other site I saw a picture on image results and it took me to that listing.
If that zdtronic site has it, be prepared to pay a premium for a used drive. Especially if they're charging $80 for 4 250mb disks (which is like 70€).