USB v IDE (ZIP Drives)

smitbret

Distinguished
Aug 5, 2002
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I have a 100mb USB 1.1 External Zip Drive and a 250mb Internal IDE Zip Drive. The internal drive is set as the secondary slave. Anyway, the external drive is running off of my work computer that is a Pentium II 433mhz, the internal ZIP is on my home system Athlon 1800XP, to give you an idea of the quality of the systems. I like to swap files on ZIP disks between the two systems, particularly with Symantec ACT 2000. The access time is soooo much faster on the external USB on the old system. Is a USB connection inherently faster than IDE? WHY?
 

Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
No, IDE is 10-100x as fast as USB. USB is 1.2MB/s, IDE is from 12 to 133MB/s. But ZIP drives are very slow in comparison, around 1MB/s I think. So the speed difference is probably in the drive itself.

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