Zip and Jaz internal drive colors

Posted by LaundryMan2008@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 7 comments

I want to buy many different drives like Zip, Jaz, Bernoulli, Syquest, standard 5.25" floppy drive, QIC and others to be able to do data recovery and transfer and also to be able to sell refurbished disks, discs and tapes. But I do have one problem, I want the colors to be as consistent as possible in my PC case and I have chosen black because there is less color variation to beige and the Zip drives are £30 more for black than beige which I am having a hard time justifying when I could get a beige one for £30 cheaper but the other part of me is screaming at me to get black for my pc case for consistency. Should I get a beige one and wait for a black bezel from a faulty drive or on it's own as a spare part or spray paint it black or should I cough up the extra £30 for a genuine black bezeled one, spray painting might not be a good idea for resell value when I clear out in the future for space if I have to move a lot or when I get a SO that isn't keen on old computers or retro gaming. The other problem is a black Jaz drive, they only come in beige and green from my long fruitless search, did Iomega release a black version and if so how rare/unobtaium is it?

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7 Comments

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siliconsandwich@reddit

if you’re doing this for practical purposes then who cares about the aesthetic? you could get a case with a door if it really bothers you. otherwise, this whole hobby is a game for patient people. you can’t just buy everything you want for a build in one go. alternative colours can be more rare without being more expensive. and i’ve spent many years collecting black and silver drives of all kinds for various case types. but some people just paint their drive bezels. they all turn up eventually. sometimes i’ve had to swap bezels onto working drives in the end. all i had to do was use google to see that there are black jaz drives, what have you been using to search?

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LaundryMan2008@reddit (OP)

EBay, I was trying to see if there was one on sale and also Google which did show up a single image of a black jaz drive listing which is very expensive, probably because it’s so rare.

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MartinAncher@reddit

When working with retro hardware you have to accept that everything cannot be aesthetically correct. Soon you will find old hardware with discoloration being the norm.It comes with the hobby. Here we are happy if the old hardware just works.These old things seems to die over time. I would recommend getting a few of the drives in stock, so you can continue your business when a drive fails. Also know that the rubber bands inside the tape cartridges have likely disintegrated, so you need a supply of these just to read the media. I have sent links to 2 great videos in a previous thread about QIC tapes.

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LaundryMan2008@reddit (OP)

When I did retro gaming, I didn’t mind the look of the consoles as long as they played a game but I jumped ship to vintage computing because stuff was more expensive than the stuff I want to collect which are disks and drives which are much cheaper than a console and you only need the drive itself while a console needs a lot of cables to work and then all of the disks are are the same unlike game cartridges which can vary in price because of the game in it. I treasure aesthetics more here as I don’t want to have a beige drive in a black case sticking out like a sore thumb, I don’t mind buying beige drives after the first black one because I can swap the bezels around when the initial one fails. I know about the QIC tapes and have a post office nearby for the thick rubber bands and then the thinner rubber bands will come from a assorted bands kit which that size I rarely use so I have 200 of that size.

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MartinAncher@reddit

You seem well prepared. Great to hear. In my collection I have Zip parallel, Zip built in a Mac. Then I have QIC drives for 5" and 3" QIC tapes. And finally I have DAT drive. :-)

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LaundryMan2008@reddit (OP)

What number is the DAT drive out of curiosity? DAT (number)

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MartinAncher@reddit

No idea. It's stored away.