With 100MB in a disk that fit in your pocket, the Zip drive was the coolest way to carry files in the 1990s. It made Iomega a Wall Street darling, until thumb drives and the click of death caught up.
Iomega Zip Drive: Elite Floppy Disks Before USB Sticks
- Thread starter Amir Shoam
- Start date
gamerk2
Posts: 1,680 +2,142
yRaz
Posts: 10,109 +18,108
BobDolesGhost
Posts: 163 +270
In my childhood/teen years I was obsessed with all things computers, but alas never had enough money for a zip drive. I drooled over it a few times in envy when I ran into a friend that had one.
Rando side story - My dad was in IT for Monsanto and though I never had a zip drive, I was fortunate enough that he did bring home some really interesting bits when they were decommissioned/trashed. He brought home a DLT drive once. As soon as I could, I hooked that into the family 33MHz 486 SX (*tears @ not a DX sigh*). The DLT drive was in a chassis case with an open power supply in the back and the drive started smoking immediately when I powered it up. Panic set in! AHH!! so I reach into the case to yank the molex power connector out the back of the drive. Why you ask did I not yank the AC cable from the chassis rear? Or why did I not just hit the power rocker switch? Well... I was like 10.. So the molex plug took some force to yank it free, and when it came free my hand went backward into the power supply. Something had some volts in there lol.. My first electrocution, and very much not my last. Honestly I get zapped about every other month in my work... (and you say - "so that's whats wrong with you eh?")
Rando side story - My dad was in IT for Monsanto and though I never had a zip drive, I was fortunate enough that he did bring home some really interesting bits when they were decommissioned/trashed. He brought home a DLT drive once. As soon as I could, I hooked that into the family 33MHz 486 SX (*tears @ not a DX sigh*). The DLT drive was in a chassis case with an open power supply in the back and the drive started smoking immediately when I powered it up. Panic set in! AHH!! so I reach into the case to yank the molex power connector out the back of the drive. Why you ask did I not yank the AC cable from the chassis rear? Or why did I not just hit the power rocker switch? Well... I was like 10.. So the molex plug took some force to yank it free, and when it came free my hand went backward into the power supply. Something had some volts in there lol.. My first electrocution, and very much not my last. Honestly I get zapped about every other month in my work... (and you say - "so that's whats wrong with you eh?")
Squid Surprise
Posts: 8,322 +8,605
The flaw would be the speed… while they’d be faster than tape drives, flash drives would blow them out of the water.
We had them where I worked, and I went through 3 zip drives in 1 year. They were notoriously fragile. Great concept, poor execution.
A modern format could work in this day though. There’s a reason tape drives still exist. I use modern LTO. Flash storage degrades over time in long term storage. Bits flip, or are simply lost. Flash is designed to have power on a regular basis. Leave a sub stick, a memory card, or an SSD unplugged for a few years and you’ll come back to some level of data loss or corruption.
I have Bernoulli disks. A small stack. Long forgotten what’s on them.
Zip was an awesome idea. And they were everywhere. I had one in my BSD pc, one on my Windows system, and one in my Mac.
They were just too late to hang on, and too early to store more.
I still think the removable drive platter was a better idea over all though.
Either way, there’s nothing really stopping anyone with the will and cash from making a modern take on this. A TB in your pocket for $50 sounds appealing.
Zip was an awesome idea. And they were everywhere. I had one in my BSD pc, one on my Windows system, and one in my Mac.
They were just too late to hang on, and too early to store more.
I still think the removable drive platter was a better idea over all though.
Either way, there’s nothing really stopping anyone with the will and cash from making a modern take on this. A TB in your pocket for $50 sounds appealing.
fadingfool
Posts: 493 +672
Never had one - even at work. Went from 1.44MB floppies (with a copy of winrar) to CD-ROM burners (and treated them as disposable). Then a 128MB USB stick (in late 2002) - that served me well for many years (think I still have it somewhere). Rarely use a USB stick for anything except bios flashing and OS installs these days (cloud for most file transfers - sometimes a more direct SFTP link).
Squid Surprise
Posts: 8,322 +8,605
They’re called external HDs… and they come in the terabytes…
Tinckerbel
Posts: 35 +62
Ah, the memories... One that deserves an honourable mention, IMO, is the Iomega Jaz drive. Imagine being able to carry a whopping 1 GB of data (at one point they even had a 2 GB model) in your pocket, on a removable disk barely larger than the Zip disks that came before it. That felt like the future back then!
Alpine7995
Posts: 135 +175
Going from 1.44MB to 100MB meant carrying roughly 70 floppies’ worth of data on one disk. It’s hard to convey how luxurious that would feel to anyone currently annoyed that a game needs another 100GB update.
axiomatic13
Posts: 1,341 +2,083
I have both ZIP and JAZZ drives from my 3D Animation degree about 7 feet away from me in a closet right now.
HomeyBroDude
Posts: 38 +28
I still have my External Zip Drive and disks in one of my many PC parts boxes
I still have my External Zip Drive and disks and about 40 100mb zip discs that still work!
I don’t trust external HDDs. Slightest bump can kill one.
SSDs are not intended for long term storage offline.
LTO costs about $30-$50 and holds 40TB+. But is slow as a snail.
Zip disks were fast and efficient. If you took care of them and the drives, they were generally reliable.
There’s still a market for something modern, if anyone ever decides to do so.
I never understood how so many people had issues. I’ve never had a single problem with any of mine;
Multiple drives and many dozens of disks. All work day one well.
Squid Surprise
Posts: 8,322 +8,605
Except zipdisks weren’t reliable - not nearly as reliable as an HDD… yes, tape is the best value for large storage, but people are only going back to it because of the crazy HDD prices…
For an important backup, you should always be using multiple locations… nothing is 100%, so risks need to be mitigated.
p51d007
Posts: 5,444 +5,656
Still got a zip disk in a drawer of old computer stuff...just couldn't part with it.
johnsonlam.hk
Posts: 38 +18
Good old design that works for a while, it sells like hotcakes, thanks to Sony.
If Sony did open their MD disk for data, the ZIP will end very soon. The parallel port really works good until the click-to-death arrive.
If Sony did open their MD disk for data, the ZIP will end very soon. The parallel port really works good until the click-to-death arrive.
I’ve always used tape as the primary and secondary backups.
I never had any issue with Zip disks. Still using them today though only for stuff already on them. Prices don’t match the space or the speed.
LetTheWookieWin
Posts: 220 +458
I never had a Zip drive, but I did have a parallel port version of the SyQuest EZ135 drive when I was in college. That drive was amazing for the time as it was basically an ejectable hard drive. It was much faster than a Zip drive, so in addition to using it for backup, you could also run programs directly from it with reasonable load times. Capacity was also quite good considering my HDD at the time was 850 MB. 135 MB of removable storage was hard to beat until CD-RWs came out in the late 90’s with 650 MB. But even that was a very different experience than having a fast rewritable HDD cartridge.
PS. Kudos for the Tandy 1000 graphic - the PC I learned to program with.
PS. Kudos for the Tandy 1000 graphic - the PC I learned to program with.
Last edited:
Squid Surprise
Posts: 8,322 +8,605
Not sure how you can possibly justify still using a Zip drive / Zip disk today... and while tape is certainly a viable backup, why not ALSO use HDD as they are VERY slow to restore files from...
Similar threads
