I am going to buy a Zip 250 drive to transfer files from home to school. Will it hurt performance wise if I use the same cable as my hard drive? I have hear that it isn't good to run CD-ROM on the same cable as a HD because of the noise the CD-ROM creates in the cable, but that might have be solved with the 80-wire cables but I haven't heard anything about them.

Yea, it will give you best performace if the HD is alone on the IDE 1 channel, but if you only use the ZIP drive occationally to backup stuff, it won't hurt.

If you are transferring from the HD to the Zip Drive, the whole cable will only runa as fast as the slowest drive. You won't technically hrt anything, like Sol said, but transfer speeds will slow some.

Of course, it may not even be enough that you would notice.

By the way, why not just a CD burner? I'm guessing the school has 'em already? I had a chance to grab a ZIP drive at a garage sale, but decided against it because I already got the burner, and that'* cheap and easy.

school teacher said that zip disk were manatory...we have to use htem i guess