David Hayward fondly recalls a long lost form of portable storage
Back in the early to mid-90s, the sizes of PC files and folders, games and other programs were starting to expand well beyond the capabilities of the humble floppy disk. Having a copy of Beneath a Steel Sky, Tie Fighter and Blackthorne, along with your college work soon meant owning huge piles of floppies and made the transporting of data from one machine to the next somewhat difficult and tedious.
Then all of sudden, Iomega introduced the Zip drive. This was to be the next generation of storage, the spiritual successor to the floppy, which had already seen many decades of service.
There were other examples of much greater storage around that time, though. CDs were fast becoming the norm, and access to old IDE hard drives through a parallel port converter was also available to those who needed extra portable storage.
There was something about a Zip drive, though, that seemed better than the rest. It was sturdy, it looked like a floppy disk, and it was reasonably quick – much quicker than what we were previously used to anyway.
They were also cross platform and came in both external and internal versions. And they made excellent backup devices for aging PABX systems, as well as a decent and cheaper backup solution to tape drives.
Its History
The Zip drive was launched in 1994 and offered enormous capacities of 100MB and upwards as the years rolled on. They were significantly better than the previous generation of portable storage in many ways, in that they were faster, could withstand more ill treatment and were generally more reliable.
Eventually, the 100MB model made room for the 250MB. These were simply crazy sizes and were actually more than the hard drives in most PCs. After that, the 750MB version was made available.
But the Zip drive was up against some stiff competition, mainly in the form of the optical drive. Whereas an early Zip disk would hold 100MB, a CD could hold 700MB right from the start. There was also a price issue that would eventually come to be the Zip drive’s undoing. A 100MB Zip disk would cost around five or six pounds each, and as time marched on, the cost of producing a CD dropped so much that a single unit would set you back mere pence.
CD-RWs then made an appearance as a regular fixture in modern PCs, and the process of writing data to an optical disc became a little steadier and more reliable. Then, of course, came along the USB flash drive, and the poor old Zip drive never stood a chance.
There is a happy ending to the Zip drive, though: they’re often used by retro computing enthusiasts and also as a means of backing up remote servers that don’t have a decent internet connection.
The Good
Compared to the 1.44MB of a floppy disk, the sudden ability to store 100MB was simply amazing. They were portable and they were a lot harder to break than anything previously.
The Bad
Despite their advantages, they were expensive and some models were prone to the dreaded ‘Click of Death’.
Conclusion
Iomega Zip drives, you may not have lasted very long on the PC scene, but we loved you nonetheless.
Did You Know?
• The Click of Death (COD) could happen at any time, and when it did, it had the habit of destroying any other Zip disk you inserted.
• Apparently, there was a software tool available called Trouble in Paradise, which spun the disk so fast it overheated and purposely damaged the drive.
• You could get past the password protection by setting the device with a new password and putting it into sleep mode. Then you could use a paperclip and force eject the disk, put in a password protected disk and power the drive up to remove the password protection.
• Iomega even developed a Zip disk camera, called the ZipCam.