I have 4 SCSI2SD drives for various Macs including an external which boots the Plus fine. Had two Zip drives break on me while using it for a boot disk for the plus. The clicks of death occurred which also destroyed the Zip disk and all info was gone.

I still have a SCSI and a usb Zip drive which is great for transferring info between the compact Macs and my Lombard, however, as a boot drive, don't think the zip was made to handle continuous read/write like a floppy.

Have a floppy emu, but haven't set it up yet. Looks to be perfect for the 512k. Looking forward to trying it out.