I use a zip drive frequently. My opinion also is that they are great and very usefull. Just about every computer at my university has a zip drive. That makes things very convenient for me. As far as I know, no computers for students have cd-rw or cd-r drives. It's a lot more convenient to be able to transfer ~100MB's as opposed to 1.44.

The ide version is much faster than parralle. I use the zip100.