Zip it. ZIP it! Zzzip. (Iomega ZIPCD)

Member Name: LegendaryMrDude

Product:	Iomega ZIPCD
Date:	06/11/01 (435 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Software, Support

Disadvantages: Reliability, NOT burn-proof

In January this year, I finally convinced my conscience that I needed a CD-Writer, for backups and the like. Having previously owned an Iomega Ditto tape drive and been more than impressed by Iomega customer services (a replacement unit was sent to me within 1 week of reporting a fault!), I didn't have any reservations about investing in their ZipCD re-writer (internal IDE). Boasting a 24x read speed with 4x write and 4x re-write it was not too far off top of the range at the time, add to this the software (Adaptec EasyCd, CD Copier Deluxe and DirectCD) and it looked an attractive bundle for the price.

When it arrived, I was not disappointed. Opening the gaudy Iomega style retail packaging revealed a neat looking IDE drive with the standard headphone socket, volume dial and LEDs on the front and IDE socket with power and audio connectors on the back. Installing the drive was a doddle. Set the jumpers on the rear to make it a 'slave' IDE device, screw it into the case, plug a power lead and IDE cable in and you're away. The machine booted and recognised the new drive along with the other IDE devices, Windows started as normal and I could red regular CDs from the drive straight away! So it's first job was to install the supplied software.

The Iomega CD is an autorun affair that starts up a graphics intensive user interface that takes you through the software installation. You have the option to install EasyCd Creator, DirectCD and CD-Copier Deluxe. I chose all 3. One reboot later and I was ready to burn my first CD (two CD-Rs had come with the drive, a shame they hadn't included a CD-RW as well!). First things first, I selected a load of files that I wanted to archive off my hard disk. EasyCD Creator to the rescue... a simple explorer style interface saw me dragging and dropping files into the window and building up the directory structure of my CD. Once I was happy with the layout, I simply clicked 'record'. This bein
g my first home-burned CD and everything, I sat and watched it through the whole process. At least that was my intention, I gave up after 15 minutes and went to watch the TV... it looked like 600Mb of data was going to take a while. On my return some time later (I can't remember how long), I found the CD tray ejected and my frist home-made CD sitting there waiting for me. EasyCd was reporting a successful completion, so I quickly put it in my regular CD-ROM drive to check it out. Everything had worked fine!

If only this was normal. Unfortunately, I think my first CD must have been a fluke. Over the last 10 months I have probably worked my way through around 40 - 50 CD-Rs, at least 25% of which have been 'binned' due to write failures. Even the simplest of tasks, such as copying a music CD (for backup purposes. No, honestly!) is not safe from the 'gremlins'. I have a few music CDs where the music appears to 'skip' mid-tune, only for a fraction of a second but it's noticeable all the same. Data CDs are even worse, the drive just reports I/O (input/output) errors and ejects a useless, half-burned CD. Not all the time, I can usually manage to burn two CDs before it starts scrapping discs, but that's hardly acceptable!

Checking the Iomega support site revealed that there had been a firmware (the on-board instructions that tell the CD-writer how to behave) update for my drive, so I downloaded that in the hope that it would fix my problems. The actual firmware upgrade application worked a treat, needing two reboots but working seamlessly. Unfortunately the new firmware didn't fix the problems I had been experiencing. The only other advice the Iomega support site could offer was to "close all other applications while burning a CD". I'd already tried this, even shutting down programs in the system tray but to no avail. I decided to give it one more go, this time using the far more drastic Ctrl-Alt-Del me
thod to bring up a list of running applications and then brutally killing anything listed. Amazingly, it worked. I was able to burn three, even four CDs in succession. But hardly an ideal solution and it left Windows in a rather shaky state. It would appear that the problem is down to the fact that a year ago, there wasn't really such a thing as a 'burn-proof' CD-writer. What this means is that the CD-writer buffers up the data it wants to write in system memory, making sure that it has enough data in the buffer to write a continuous stream to the CD (because you can't really pause a CD in mid-recording). What seems to happen with my ZipCD writer is either that the buffer gets empty or access to the buffer is delayed by other events on the PC, which interrupts the recording process and scraps the whole disc. Ho-hum. The only way around this is to make sure that there are as few applications running as possible to try and reduce the competition for system resources while you are burning a CD. This could probably be considered good-practice for CD-burning anyway, but for the ZipCD, it should be considered ESSENTIAL (and this seems to be irrespective of how 'powerful' a machine you have, I've run into this same problem when I was running an AMD K6-2 500Mhz and again when I upgraded to an Athlon 1.2Ghz).

So to sum up then, the ZipCD-RW (24x4x4) is a nice looking drive with a good software bundle. But it suffers from some serious problems when it comes to actually recording CDs. Provided you don't burn CDs all that often you can probably live with it but if you make regular use of it, it will soon become an almighty annoyance. For myself, I have all but given up on the ZipCd and bought a burn-proof Yamaha SCSI CD Re-writer instead.

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