External FDD/ZIP Drives Guide
Most refurbished notebooks offers available don't contain FDD drive, although you can meet it in some older models, sometimes interchangeable with CD/DVD drive like in some Dell and IBM laptops. As floppy disk capacity and reliability are very low, almost nobody use floppies today. If you have to, you have a choice of external USB or PCMCIA floppy drives at low prices.
Floppy Drive
There are many alternative and better solutions than floppy drive. One floppy can store 1.44MB of data. If you
just want to move some text files or not too big documents it's ok. But you still cannot be sure if
data wouldn't be damaged when you reach your target place, because floppies are the most unreliable storage you
can meet today. If you want to move more data, remember that one floppy will
not accommodate even half of average mp3 file.
Typical external floppy drive comes with USB interface. It doesn't matter if your laptop supports USB 2.0 or only USB 1.1 because floppy drives transfer rates are much lower than USB 1.1 1.5MB/s limitation. USB is also used as power source so you don't need to connect any external power supplies. Drives are usually very light and small, only a bit bigger and thicker than a floppy disk and fit nice in every laptop case. You can get new drive for about $30 or find some used or refurbished at much lower prices. Many drives can write and read floppies at higher than standard speeds, what makes using this obsolete storage a little more comfortable.
ZIP Drive
A ZIP drive is a great replacement of traditional FDD. It is reliable, faster and the most important -
can store up to 750MB on a single disk. ZIP disks look similar to floppies and come in three versions -
100MB, 250MB and 750MB. Drives that can read bigger disks are also compatible with less capacious versions, although some 750MB drives cannot write 100MB disks.
ZIP disk combines floppy disk flexibility (writing and deleting single files or directories) with CD capacity. They are also more convenient and durable than CDs because they data surface is not opened like in the latter. However, they are more expensive. ZIP drives usually come with USB 2.0 or FireWire interface.
Most ZIP drives are powered through their data interface cable and do not need external power supplies, just like floppy drives. You can buy ZIP-100 drive that accepts only 100MB disks for about $50. ZIP-250 and ZIP-750 drives are more expensive. Transfer rates of external ZIP drives are rather low, usually below 1MB/s, so you can connect it either to USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 without noticing any difference in speed.
ZIP disks are very convenient and reliable storage. External ZIP-100 drives are only about 50% more expensive than external floppy drives, giving you 7000% more capacious and hundreds times more reliable storage. Looking at prices and capabilities, ZIP drive is a much better choice. And if you need to read or write floppies, every ZIP drive can do this as well.
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