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Re: LS120 and Linux



Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:

> But if I may suggest - I would definately recommend the ZIP drive rather then
> the dying (and it is dying) LS120 drive..
> 
> My reasons:
> 
> 1. The drive can be accessible either through parallel or USB - so you can take
> it and connect it anywhere.
> 2. It's supported under any OS - either it's Linux, *BSD, and even QNX!
> 3. It's much easier to get the floppies to - you can get from many stores the
> zip floppies, but not on the LS120 (trust me, I checked it once)
> 4. They are very reliable. There were faulty ZIP drive few years ago (with the
> problem called "click of death") which has been fixed long time ago. I still
> have ZIP floppies which works perfectly after 4 years now.
> 5. They're more popular :)
> 
> So, in short, I would not recommend to buy the LS120. The media is too small,
> and the function to read floppies is not that much of a benefit. A floppy drive
> today costs 15$.

Of course, the question was not if it is recommended or not. Anyway,
since you raised the issue, let me raise some other points.

First, we are limited in space, electricity, money, bays, etc. We
always can have one card for modem and one for fax. Or one monitor
for text and one for graphics. Or a fax machine only for incoming
faxes (without the scanning features) and another one only for
outgoing faxes (without paper and printing). I could detail
zillions of advantages for these separations. But as I said, we want
to save space/electricity/money/bays/channels/etc., and LS120 may
replace the 1.44MB drive, while letting you to use its special media
(LS120 is not expensive - only $110). The same claims were said
regarding CDR/CDRW a few years ago, but recently, after everybody
wrote them off, they started to become standard on most new PC's,
because there is no alternative for the "multi-function" advantage
(many new PC's come with a built-in CDRW *INSTEAD* of a CDROM,
saving space, money, electricity, bays, channels, and cables).

Second, don't write off a size of 120MB so quickly; After all, all
of us still use 1.44MB (at least for booting and transfers of small
files between separate computers), and 120MB is 8,233% bigger. There
are mini-distribution of Linux which take only one diskette of 1.44.
Most of us still use an analog dial-up of 5KB (bytes, not bits) per
second, so 24,000 seconds are needed to fill one diskette even in
ideal conditions.

And third, some companies already have some LS120 drives, but no
ZIP; Why should they buy new computers with ZIP?  Their current
media (which was written using their current LS120) will not be
readable by these computers, and no transfers (without networking)
will be possible between the old and the new computers or vice versa.

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