Zip drive

Zip is the brand name of a no longer produced series of removable disk drives of the company iomega. The drives work on the same principle as floppy drives and hard drives, ie the data bits are stored magnetically on a rotating disk.

Zip drives are available both as an internal device in the 3.5-inch width for installation in a computer case as well as external devices with its own housing and its own power supply. The internal Zip drives are connected through the ATA or SCSI bus to the computer and were manufactured as OEM versions for various manufacturers (IBM, Dell, Apple Macintosh, model series G3 and G4 ). External Zip drives can be connected to the computer depending on the version of the USB, parallel, FireWire or SCSI interface. The external SCSI Zip drives also still have a switch to select the SCSI ID and a switch to terminate the SCSI chain.

While the first devices still had a capacity of 100 MB (1 MB = 1024 kB ) per Zip disk, later versions followed with 250 MB and 750 MB. The drives for 750 MB to 100 -MB media only read but not write.

The dimensions of the medium will be approximately 98 mm × 99 mm × 7 mm.

In the second half of the 1990s were the Zip drives, especially the first generation of 100 MB, very popular and one of the most common computer peripherals. Contributed significantly to the success that there was virtually no competitors and that CD burners at this time were still relatively expensive.

With the falling prices of CD burners and the introduction of a rewritable CD -RW, and finally from USB sticks Zip disk was driven from the market. Then there was an increasingly bad reputation of Zip drives by the frequent "Click of Death", a head crash by a misaligned or dirty write, the media and drive damaged or destroyed.

Pictures

Zip drive inside

Zip disk

External Zip drive for 250 -MB media

Internal ZIP drive for 100 -MB media