Floppies Are Out





But does the new high-capacity ZIP drive work with Warp?
by Ken Willard

The old saying goes that you can never have enough free drive space. But with the demands of today's high power applications, and the monster size of multimedia graphics and sound files, hard drives are shrinking fast.

One of the newest innovations is Iomega's ZIP drive. A ZIP disk will store 100 MB of files on a 4" disk. One of the bonus features is that the access time and drive speed approach that of a hard drive, because that is essentially what a ZIP disk is - a small hard drive platter in a removable format. The true test though: Is the drive compatible with Warp? The answer: yes, with a few things you need to watch out for.

Installation
I installed the Parallel Port version of the drive, which plugs into the printer port on the back of my machine, and allows a printer to pass through the device. The ZIP disk is also available in SCSI internal and external formats. The physical installation is a breeze and follows the Installation Guide step-by-step. Once all the physical connections are made, the device driver software needs to be installed. These OS/2 device drivers do not ship in the box, but can be downloaded from the Internet, or ordered directly from Iomega. Iomega has their own FTP server, but has also made arrangements with Internet Gateway, Inc. to mirror all of their device drivers and support files. The fact the Iomega went to the effort to provide a secondary source for their information may give you some idea how popular these drivers are. The OS/2 device drivers are available at: Now is when things get interesting. The device driver installation is a multi-reboot process that runs from a command window, not in the Workplace Shell - the first point I noticed that could use some polishing by Iomega. All of the documentation for the OS/2 driver comes in the form of an online guide that gives the option of printing the whole thing on your printer - not very convenient, either.
 * Iomega FTP Site
 * Internet Gateway, Inc. mirror site

Iomega provides two types of device drivers for OS/2: a standard ADD file, which is simply copied into the \OS2\BOOT directory and added as a BASEDEV in the CONFIG.SYS file, and what they call their Open Architecture Drivers (OAD). The difference is this: if you bought a SCSI connect ZIP Drive, you can use the ADD file, but if you bought the parallel connect ZIP Drive like I did, then you must use the OAD files. There are other considerations and tuning options, so I recommend you read the online document completely.

To add the base OAD driver, you use the Install Device Drivers, icon in the System Setup, place the OS/2 driver disk in your floppy drive, and off you go. All the OAD driver files will be copied into a directory on your hard disk. After installing the driver, you have to reboot the computer to invoke the driver, and then run the GENOAD program to scan for the drive and set the appropriate configuration files. One more reboot, and you should be up and running.

There is one interesting twist that I haven't taken the time to resolve. When I first began using my ZIP Drive, several of the disks were turning up with the Extended Attribute file or directory file corrupted. I tracked the problem to the FAT file disk caching utility installed on my system by default. My quick-fix solution is to disable the FAT file cache by removing the DISKCACHE= line in my CONFIG.SYS file. This only good idea if you are on HPFS partitions for your most-used disks, since removing this line only affects FAT file systems like your floppy disk drive. Since HPFS caching is managed in the HPFS statement, I was able to completely disable FAT caching on my system and only really impact the performance of the ZIP Drive itself.

The ZIP Drive has countless ideal uses. For one, my once huge diskette collection is now down to six, four-inch ZIP Disk, and I have reclaimed all that storage space (room for cool stuff). Many of my friends and associates have invested in ZIP Drives so we can now visit each other and take data for and entire project with us in our pocket. Backup, information organization, physically securing data, giving each of your kids a 100mb hard drive of their own (for about $20!) are just a few of the practical uses of the ZIP Disks.

The ZIP Drive has a found a permanent place on my desk and is fast becoming my favorite piece of hardware. The ZIP Drive gets high marks in my book, the OS/2 support and docs score fair to low, but it does work, and is still an overall good investment.