The good old Zip Drive introduced by Iomega in late 1994 served it’s purpose as a medium-capacity removable disk storage system until obsolescence kicked in as it was replaced by flash drives as well as rewritable CDs and DVDs. Here are a few things you can do to give new life to that outdated drive. Have you made creative use of yours? If so, tell us.
To download The New Life For Old Zip Drives MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.
Check out the Zippy the Marionette article MAKE 13 “Zippy The Marionette”
and you can see that in our digital edition.
26 thoughts on “Weekend Project: New Life For Old Zip Drives”
Comments are closed.
ADVERTISEMENT
Support Make:
Join Make: Community Today
Join Make: Community Today
Nice video this week Kip, the Air-tool made me laugh.
The port on the rear of a Zip drive is either a parallel (printer) port or a SCSI port. These were much faster than the serial ports.
One of the great things about the enclure is the window in the top, ideal for showing off your handy work, or for placing a a screen or information behing, where it’ll be nice and safe!
@ pe’er – You are right! My bad. That just shows you how long it’s been since I used one. I watched the edited vid a half dozen times and finally realized my mistake after I uploaded it. I even looked right at the little embossed printer icon and completely overlooked it. Brain fart. Thanks for the clarification.
The zip drive used parallel ports, not serial or SCSI. You actually connected it to the parallel printer port on your computer.
who need to watch such pointless videos.
Who’d want to put a sleek small device in a big old case?
Weekend Project: How to wipe off your a**!
Weekend Project: Think for yourself!
@ sfhgsfgh – The purpose of the first project was to make a covert, sneaky, hidden storage container for ‘top secret’ data on a hard drive that most people would not know existed. You must have missed that so I thought I would point it out to you. As far as “How to wipe off your ape”…I just use a little “Fantastik Orange Action All Purpose Cleaner, but you have to hold him down because they don’t like the smell. Hope that helps!
I have 3 in my garage right now. They had to make a SCSI interface for the Mac users since they didn’t(don’t?) have parallel ports.
It didn’t have a commercial in the middle of it. KipKay, I realize you’re looking to make a buck or two, but it’s really better without the commercials.
As for content, it’s unfortunately we threw out our old Zip Drive back when it clicked.
@ Erik – Just so you know, I have no say about the ads in the Weekend Project videos. They are MAKE advertisers. I too tossed a few zip drives away back in the day so I had to scramble and locate a few from friends for these projects. Thanks for the comment.
I like creating Zip drive bouquets to add mood — and zip — to my apartment.
see http://redecoratingtipsfor.blogspot.com/
@phil shapiro – Okay, now THAT’s funny! I hope most people can get the imagery of some of that like I did. Nice work.
Thanks for the vid! I just finished up a full garage clean-out, and what did I find but my old zip drive. I remember tweaking my linux kernel *just so* so that blasted blue bugger would work. I even found a few zip disk with who knows what on them. As soon as I find a machine with a || port, I’ll dump ’em and then find something good to do with the drive. I dig the nerd-tastic piggy bank, maybe with a few switches and LEDs that serve no particular purpose ;)
The wikipedia article on zip drives lists atapi, lpt, scsi, usb, and firewire interfaces. So everyone is right!
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive)
Great article and a fine series – thanks, KipKay!