FWIW I use a Zip drive as a HD with my Apple IIGS. It is a lot less noisy than my SCSI hard drives and, quite frankly, I have more confidence in it than the real HDs.

Two more pluses; Zip drives are more available and less costly.

The drive ejects the disk on shutdown but I haven't tried to make it not so. All I do is shove the disk back in before starting up.

Iomega has sold tons of drives in spite of the "unreliable" knock they've taken. I don't think all that many of the sales were just replacements for the failed ones.