Zip Drives (38120)

The Zip drive is a medium-capacity removable disk storage system, introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Originally it had a capacity of 100 MB, but later versions increased this to first 250 MB and then 750 MB. more...

Home
Apple, Macintosh Computers
Desktop PC Components
Desktop PCs
Drives, Controllers &...
Laptop Parts & Accessories
Adapters, Chargers for...
Batteries for Laptops...
Cables, Connectors for...
Cases, Bags for Laptops...
CPUs for Laptops (86711)
Docking Stations for...
Drives for Laptops (31533)
Cases, Caddy, Enclosures...
CD-R, CD-RW Drives (38116)
CD-ROM Drives (42179)
Combo Drives (64473)
DVD Drives (64476)
Floppy Drives (42181)
Hard Drives (38117)
Other Drives (11171)
Zip Drives (38120)
Hubs (116343)
Keyboards for Laptops...
Laptop Memory Card...
LED Lites (116345)
Memory Upgrades for...
Mice, Mouse for Laptops...
Motherboards for Laptops...
Mounts, Auto Mounts (116346)
Other Parts & Accessories...
PCMCIA Cards for Laptops...
Repair, Service Manuals...
Screens, LCD Panel for...
Security for Laptops (31529)
Video & Sound for Laptops...
Wholesale Lots (82633)
Laptops, Notebooks
Monitors & Projectors
Networking
Other
Printer Supplies &...
Printers
Scanners
Software
Vintage Computing Products

The format became the most popular of the super-floppy type products but never reached the status of a quasi-standard to replace the 3.5-inch floppy disk. It has been superseded by flash drive systems as well as rewritable CDs and DVDs, and is fading in popularity. The Zip brand was also used for internal and external CD writers known as Zip-650 or Zip-CD.

Overview

The Zip system is based loosely on Iomega's earlier Bernoulli Box system; in both systems, a set of read/write heads mounted on a linear actuator flies over a rapidly spinning floppy disk mounted in a sturdy cartridge. The Zip disk uses smaller media (about the size of a 9 cm (3½") microfloppy, rather than the compact disc-sized Bernoulli media), and a simplified drive design that reduced its overall cost.

This resulted in a disk that has all of the 9 cm (3½") floppy's convenience, but holds much more data, with performance that is much quicker than a standard floppy drive (though not directly competitive with hard drives). The original Zip drive had a data transfer rate of about 1 megabyte/second and a seek time of 28 milliseconds on average, compared to a standard 1.44 MB floppy's 500 kbit/s (62.5 kB/s) transfer rate and several-hundred millisecond average seek time. (Today's average 7200 RPM desktop hard drives have average seek times of around 8.5-9 ms.)

Interfaces

Zip drives have been made with a variety of interfaces to the computer. Internal drives have been made with ATAPI (IDE), and SCSI interfaces. External drives have been made with parallel port and SCSI interfaces and (some years later) USB. For a while, there was a drive called the Zip Plus which was supposed to be able to autodetect between parallel and SCSI, but there were lots of compatibility problems reported and the drive was later dropped. The Zip Plus drive included additional software and a smaller power adapter than the original Zip drives.

Capacity

The initial Zip system was introduced with a capacity of 100 megabytes. Plans were considered for a lower cost 25 MB version that would work in the same 100 MB drive — the idea being to bring the price of a Zip disk closer to that of an ordinary floppy — but these disks seem not to have been released. The introduction of the 100 megabyte disk quickly made Zip a success and people used them to store files larger than the 1.44 MB capacity of regular floppy disks. As time went on, Iomega eventually increased the capacity to 250 and later 750 megabytes, while improving the data transfer rate and seek times.

Read more at Wikipedia.org