Iomega Zip 250 Parallel Drive Soooo Slow

V

Valek

Guest
Hi everyone, looking for some insight here. I have an Iomega Zip Drive and for some odd reason it is Sooooo Damned slow in transferring data, being opened in explorer, anything.

Here are my System Specs:

Asus P4T-E Mainboard, Bios 1005
1.6Ghz P4
512MB RDRAM
40GB Seagate Barracuda ATA 100 HDD
Leadtek Winfast GeForce3
Hercules Game Theater XP Sound Card
Generic 56X CDRom
Plextor 24/10/40A CDRW
Windows XP Professional with all Updates installed.

I have NO other problems with this system....it is so smooth it's like plastic sheets covered in baby oil and ROCK solid, but everytime I try to access a file or folder on the Zip Drive it slows to a crawl. I want to COMPLETELY turn of the multimedia search function as well but I think I can figure that one out...if not I'll be back. I have set my parallel port to EPP in the BIOS as EPP+ECC seemed to make it slower under Windows 98 on the same system, but maybe I should change it back now that I'm running XP and see if that makes a difference. My printer is USB so there's no conflict there with the pass through port. Write Caching has been disabled by Windows and does not give me the option to enable it. I cannot tell what mode it is running in either. I also did not install Iomega's drivers (v 3.1) as my last experience with Iomega drivers and an internal Zip 250 on XP resulted in me having to reformat and reinstall XP. I just let windows use its reference drivers for it.

Who else has a Parallel Zip 250 and how does it run? What settings do you have enabled in XP or your BIOS? I'm stumped and Iomega Support has not been good.
 
No No No !

Parallel = FAST with accelerated parallel port.
But IOmega are too lazy and don't want to write good drivers for XP => no PP acceleration => slow.

My // Zip100 drive was TWICE FASTER when I was under Win98. But of course, the IOmega drivers for win98 don't work with XP. :(

It then took 3:35 minutes to transfer 100 MB. Now it takes 7:10 minutes and it's inadmissible!
 
Actually, since my original post I have changed my parallel port mode back to EPP+ECP under XP and now it takes ROUGHLY 3-4 minutes to transfer 250 MB from the disk to HDD and 4-5 minutes to write the same data back. I think my previous install of Windows 98 was screwed somehow and I have a sneaking suspicion that it was Intel's Application Accelerator. There were just too many quirks that I have never seen, and...like you, when I ran the Zip Drive under 98 with the parallel port accelerator it did wonderful. But, I cannot complain about the performance I am getting now since changing my settings. Actually I think Microsoft did a Great job of providing reference drivers for most everything. I also believe that XP is very...for lack of a better way to put it...Hardware Specific. What I mean by that is while it will "work" with quite a number of hardware configurations, it will truly work best on systems that were made with it in mind...i.e. Athlon XP or P4. As I said, my system now with the I850 chipset and RAMBUS is so rock solid that even I keep expecting to wake up sometime. I still use the same programs I used under 98 (with the exception of a new printer) and do the same things, but with the first system I built, an Athlon 1.2 Ghz, 1GB of RAM on an Asus A7V, I would constantly have problems (lockups and crashes) to the point that I said screw it and put 98 back on it and it has worked beautifully since.

Okay okay, rambling here, I'm sorry.
 
???

Are you saying that you are using XP built-in drivers for your parallel Zip Drive ???
After installing XP, it did not detect my Zip drive so I thought I'd need to install drivers from IOmega.
Would you confirm that I could achieve fast transfers if I was trying to make XP detect my Zip drive instead of installing the IOmega drivers ?
 
Yes,

I simply had my zip drive hooked up to my parallel port when I installed XP and it detected it with no problems (except in My Computer it shows it as A Zip 100 icon). In device manager it shows up as a Iomega Zip 250 with no problems and works great. The drivers supplied by Iomega SUCK and will actually cause 2000 and XP to lock up and crash. So bad that Microsoft actually included it as a scenario in their 70-210 test for Windows 2000 Professional and 215 test for Windows 2000 Sever. If you use XP's reference drivers it works great. Change your parallel port settings in your BIOS to ECP+EPP.
 

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