I just picked up an Iomega Zip100 drive for $5. Was this a good deal? And could anyone link me to where I can find zip disks and a parallel port to usb converter for cheap? Thanks.

Why would you want a Zip drive anyway? Zip disks are unreliable pieces of crap designed for hardware 10 years ago, not today...

I love how somebody asks for hardware advice and the first person to respond goes "why would you want that anyway?" It doesn't matter. He wanted it, he bought it.

Yes, Gamma, that was a great price for a Zip drive. And just type "Zip disk" and "Parallel port to USB adapter" into Google and you'll get plenty of cheap search results.

Why the heck does a ten pack cost $90??? And yes, I wanted it. For $5 I figured it was worth the gamble. I also bought some small tamon speakers from the 70s for $5. They have a vintage sound to them, although the quality of their sound could be better. But they're pretty, and they work, so I figure $5 was worth it for them too.

Careful, you never know when the "click of death" will strike…

If you are serious about using these old kinds of removables, I would recommend LS120 "SuperDisks", M-O Drives (e.g bernoulli disks), or Jaz disks…

Personally I bought 5 years ago for something like 18$ ZIP 100 drive with 3 Disc and it work to this day. Last days (2 week ago) I bought ZIP 200 Drive with 3 250 MB Disc for about 33$ with original Box, manual etc. and it works great. I bought it to use with old laptop, but trust me in future those drive will get much more worth...

I have an external parallel Zip 100 which I know works and a Zip 100 in my PowerMac G4. Never seen if that works.
I do know you can get parallel -> USB adapters, they're just not commonly bought so you'll have to do some deep googling.

many usb to parallel converters are not true parallel ports , they only do the basic for printing support

Quite true. I myself don't use them but I have seen a couple that are proper adapters and not cheap cables.

The Zip 100 drives in Powermac G4's are actually standard IDE versions, so you could easily hook it up to a "normal" computer to test it and/or the disks. If you don't have an IDE port in your computer anymore, you could use an IDE->USB adapter. They work fine with those adapters usually, but the drives can draw quite a lot of power, so a good PSU is a must. Connecting them to your PCs internal PSU for power, and data via the USB adapter (if you don't have internal IDE anymore) would be the safest bet to get them working. Drivers aren't needed as far as I know, as they get detected as a standard removable drive (sort of like a normal floppy drive, but with more capacity obviously).

I've had one Zip drive die with the click of death just last week Not fun.
LS120 is definitely cool, but kinda useless for transferring "large" files to old laptops and such, unlike those Zip100 drives which were available (and most common?) as parallel port versions, which pretty much all of those old laptops have.

I still have a "new" Panasonic made LS120 drive double-pack bundle in the original box, complete with an ISA IDE controller (Promise FloppyMAX with its own BIOS) and four (still sealed) disks, as well as several used drives and a diskette box about half full with LS120 disks.
They're pretty damn fast (also much faster reading/writing regular 1.44MB disks) and the electronic eject is just cool
The only drawback seems to be that the bezels/faceplates break off all the time.. the plastic tabs holding them on are tiny. Total design fail IMO.

http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/2012-06/1339265627.or.75062.jpg
http://www.betaarchive.com/imageupload/2012-06/1339265674.or.15220.jpg

I should know that, considering the countless times I've rebuilt and serviced the machine and my purchase of drives years ago. Plus the yikes! PowerMac G4 has no other storage bus. Only ATA/IDE.