I think maybe my work machine's zip drive is faulty. I had terrible trouble trying to transfer some stuff to a machine at home last week, and it has a joyous habit of corrupting the filesystems on my archive zip disks that have five year old email on them. Eeeeek.

So I now have no trust in zip disks as an archival medium, and I'm shopping for a CD writer.

It's not as terrifying as I was expecting, and they seem to be well supported under Linux. There's a huge number of different drives, but it seems like most of them speak the same language and once I've picked an ATAPI drive and plugged it all in there shouldn't be too much to it. (Famous last words...)

Of course I have no idea what a good brand is. I guess the next step is to check out the selection at Fry's on the way in tomorrow.

I never knew ATAPI meant "SCSI over IDE". What a horrible hack IDE is! And looking at the front of the machine in front of me, it occurs to me that 4 - (CD + Zip + CD-RW) = not many IDE spaces left for hard drives. Hmmm...