Overdrive / Zappo external HDD

[Steve T]

Back in probably '94 I persuaded my parents to buy me a hard drive for my amiga, an external PCMCIA device so I wouldn't invalidate the 5 years of extended warranty (lol) that currys had talked the folks into buying with the machine the previous year.

Anyway, the thing never worked right, I would have installed it with the 3.0 workbench disks that came with the Desktop but i would have problems with the drive quickly becoming unusable, I'd have to format it and start again etc.

Perhaps I didn't really know what I was doing, But i followed all the instructions, I sent it back to the manufacturer, about a month later I got it back saying there was nothing wrong with the device. I think my folks (far from computer literate - to this day they refuse to learn anything about computers) just thought I was doing something wrong.

The drive / interface unit has been long gone so I can never try anything with it. But I always wondered what was wrong with the thing, it was one of the things that put me off amiga computing and I lost interest quickly after that - the drive itself was about £250 for a 250mb model! And felt like money that would have been better spent elsewhere.

Did anyone else have one of these? did it work ok? It was powered off the external floppy connector, thinking about it in later years i wondered if this was supplying enough power? the pcmcia port works fine because I still use it for CF and network adapters - works great.