Iomega Ditto Max ][Consumer-Level Tape Drive][

Haîcíì

Hey Everyone,

Have you ever made one of those dumb eBay purchases the second you wake up just because the item was in your followed search list? Well I made one of those dumb purchases about half an hour ago. http://www.ebay.com/itm/222284642554?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

I've always been intrigued by how far tape drives have come, and this will be the first fully-together one I've ever owned myself.. though I have fixed two HP 9-track drives for someone else, that was some interesting and relatively fun schtuff.

I just wanted to see if there was anyone out here familiar with any of Iomega's tape drives, and if anyone remembers if they're horrid, unusable or unreliable piles of --, or if anyone just remembers using one of these, ever. Just curious! I mean these cartridges kinda almost look like 8-tracks! Who doesn't want to back up their shite onto an 8-track?

Anyways, good day

totally unrelated footnote: I wonder how much data one could cram onto a DAC? Who cares though lol

thinkpadman

All I'll say is that I'm not familiar with the Ditto drives - only their Zip drives. At least it's a new one so you've got the software etc. for it.

I've been through Cungena though, vast arid plains of nothing between Poochera and Ceduna.

PCAT

I have an external SCSI ZIP100 cassette drive - those sucked. Unreliable garbage.
I have an internal IDE LS120 diskette drive - those weren't so bad, since they could read floppy diskettes at mach speed, but LS120 itself wasn't too good if I recall.

I'd love to back up my games on 8-Track, but I'd rather do it on a DIABLO removable platter!

I'm not sure how much data you could store on a DAC, if you're talking about a Digital to Analog Converter, then probably next to nil unless it's got registers or some form of internal storage for some reason.

Haîcíì

Haha! Not many people like to acknowledge Cungena. It is lacking.... just about everything. I personally cannot take for granted the silence. It's worth it in my opinion.

And I've seen a couple blue old [I assume] Zip 100 drives lying around amongst other things absolutely no one wanted to mess with. I remember hearing very similar things about them as well.. if they're so unanimously trash, I really hope iOmega did a slightly better job on their Ditto drives.. hah, oh well if the Ditto is trash then I'll keep eternally looking for an actual tape drive.
As a student in the early 2000s, I always wanted an LS120 just for the diskettes; they always intrigued me.. everyone else was perfecting CDs at the time and as well, the whole Compact Disk hype I had grown up into had turned into subtle hate for CDs as they really weren't as great as they'd promised to have been.. especially considering the price of CD drives - which made the SuperDiskettes look like sex to me at the time.

I know [or remember] next to nothing about old disk packs other than the computers that used them.. wouldn't their surface get mouldy eventually, like floppies? I only ask because I have a pair of 8" disks from [I assume] a similar era, and they're just so mouldy.. and that's from keeping them in *pretty much* perfect conditioned storage.. so I dunnoe. Now they're just in my room hanging on a wall like square LPs

Finally.. I made a typo [actually just lack of immediate research due to morning grogginess] instead of DAC, I meant Sony's DAT.


Have a good one.

SomeGuy

Never used Ditto drives. But be aware that some kinds of tapes use a plastic tension belt that may have degraded and will snap.

The original SCSI iOmega Zip 100 drives were excellent, but naturally the parallel port drives were slow and got a bad rap. Of course the disks and drives were more fragile than a floppy. And the later Zips drives (Zip 250, and later) were not really fully backwards compatible.