I just got off the phone with iomega technical support about the zip
drive.

First, about cables: the tech support person told me the pinout _is_
normal Macintosh SCSI DB-25.  The failure I mentioned when someone
accidentally reversed the cable means either that particular cable is
marginal or something else was wrong at the same time.  Perhaps they
_did_ cut corners and do a 25-wire cable instead of a real SCSI cable.

Second, about 96MB versus 100MB: the official line seems to be that the
100MB is unformatted capacity.  _I_ still think it's really metric
megabytes instead of real megabytes.

Third, real geometry: he said the appropriate geometry for a UNIX
system was 2406 cylinders, 2 alternates, 2408 physical cylinders, 2
heads, 40 sectors/track, 3600 rpm, 192480 blocks.  Since the size the
drive itself claims is _exactly_ 96 megabytes, this seems very fishy;
these are possibly just numbers that keep a Sun happy.  (I say Sun
because of the "2 alternates"; AFAIK this delusion that all drives must
have "alternate" cylinders is a Sun invention.)

Fourth, write-protect: there is some sort of software write-protect
(this is clear from the accompanying paper docs, such as they are),
which is pretty silly unless the drive firmware implements passworded
access (which it may).  I asked the tech support person if the software
protocol involved was anything that could be let out short of a
nondisclosure agreement; I don't have an answer yet - the person I
spoke with didn't know how it worked and had to talk with someone else.

I have an email outstanding to them, asking (a) if there is a hardware
write-protect if you open the case, and (b) about the software
write-protect protocol; if and when I hear back, I'll followup here.

					der Mouse

			    mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu