Iomega ZipCD: Recommended for anyone

I bought my Iomega ZipCD External Drive in early 2001 (new on eBay for $171.50), because the disks of the of the Iomega Zip Drive that I was using were about $20 each, only had a capacity of 90-100MB, and often easily became corrupted and unreadable. My dad's computer has an internal rewritable CD drive, and he liked it. So I decided to buy one. I opted for an external drive rather than an internal drive, so I could move it to another computer if I ever needed to. I guess the only down side to that is it takes up some desk space.

Because I consider myself somewhat of a fanatic about backups, I was very happy when rewritable CD players became a practical choice for this job. I have a lot of scanned photos, e-mails, documents, and etc. that I do not want to take a chance of losing if something happens to my computer (like a hard drive failure, computer virus, theft, house fire, etc). I currently have about 5GB of data that I regularly back up. I like to store the backups in a separate place from my computer so that one disaster (such as a fire) won't destroy both my computer and my backup. Backing up these files to CD-RW or CD-R disks is pretty quick and quite easy using the Iomega ZipCD External Drive.

Blank CDs are much cheaper than other types of media I have used in the past such as Zip Disks. And CDs are light to ship (if you want to shares photos for example), CDs are also inexpensive, and almost everyone has a CD player on his/her computer. With my zip drive, none of that was true. And CDs hold more data than Zip Disks or (obviously) floppy disks.

Each CD hold 650MB of data, and CDs are pretty cheap (maybe a little over a buck each average for CD-RWs and less for CD-Rs if you buy them 10 or more at a time). It's easy to set up and use. It uses the USB port on your computer and is hot swappable, which means you don't have to reboot in order to, for example, switch from having your scanner plugged in to having your ZipCD External Drive plugged in.

The Iomega ZipCD External Drive's documentation (owner's manual) doesn't come printed. It's copied to your hard drive in html format when you install the included software. Also, I haven't found the documentation to be tremendously helpful. Luckily I haven't needed to refer
to it very often.

The Iomega ZipCD External Drive can be used with both PCs and Macs. The system requirements are fairly low by today's standards (166MHz, 16MB RAM, etc).

The record/write/read speeds are 4x/4x/6x. That's acceptable for my purposes. Faster would be better, but I can live with being able to copy about 450MB of data to a CD in 20 minutes or so.

I haven't used it to make music CDs but it is capable of doing this too.

Also, I have found that one can find good deals on eBay for new blank CD-RW and CD-R disks. You can get them for about 2/3 or less of the price you might find them at Wal-Mart or some place like that. Here's a tip for finding the CDs on eBay. Include the word "media" in your search. If you just search for CD-RW or CD-R, you'll get see a bunch of other things in the search results.

Until something better comes along I highly recommend anyone having a rewritable CD drive of some kind. It doesn't necessarily have to be this brand, but I like mine. I couldn't imagine not having one. If you think you might need to use it on another computer at some point, buy an external drive.

Thanks,
fr4ed