I don't own an Iomega ZIP drive myself, but a friend does. We tried
several configuration options in DOS (nibble, byte, ecp) and watched
the throughput. Well, ECP works best, of course.
The computer in question is a P75 with 16MB RAM and a SIS chipset.
The ZIP drive is attached to the parallel printer port. In the BIOS
setup that port is configured as ECP.
Using the ppa module in 2.0.30 (I think it's version 0.26) we both
were disappointed by the performance: Even though the drive operated
in 8-bit mode, the throughput was even worse than under DOS in nibble
mode. During the test (dumping a 6MB file to /dev/null) the light of
the ZIP drive was continuously on, but the dd Process displayed stat
"D" most of the time. The module was loaded with default parameters
(that is none).
We aborted the transfer of the 6MB file after 55 seconds...
Ulrich
P.S. Not subscribed to this list.