Flashback Friday: The Zip disk

The late ’90s, when floppy disks were still in common use. Of course, the average formatted floppy disk only held 1.44MB of data. How would you store massive amounts of data in a portable format?

Enter Iomega’s Zip disk.

The Zip disk was a superfloppy, a removable disk with a high data storage capacity that was meant to replace the standard floppy disk.  The disks could only be used with an Iomega Zip drive; the drives were available in internal and external versions. I had the first generation external drive; it connected to a desktop via the parallel port.

The first generation of disks could hold 100MB of data, an impressive amount at the time. Later models could hold 250 MB or 750 MB.

However, there were numerous flaws and external factors that led to the format’s decline. The 250 MB and 750 MB disks were not compatible with the older drives.  The price of 100 MB disks started at $20 a piece. The invention of rewritable CD-ROM drives and USB flash drives led to a decline in the price of storage. Zip disks became too small and expensive for the average consumer. Then there was the infamous Click of Death, the sound of the drive’s read/write head failing to connect with the first track of the Zip disk.

Today, Zip disks are still in use by small groups of enthusiasts. The SCSI Zip drives are used by owners of classic Macintosh computers as a substitutes for the original hard drives.  They are also used in aviation for updating navigation databases.