Tech Legacy - Zip Drive (Part 25)
Remember the good old zip drive? I had one of these bad boys and seem to recall it was great for storing music and data. I mean before the age of CD's this thing rocked. Of course when CDs came a long the whole game changed!
Few people remember the zip drive but this short-lived technology was the bridge between 3.5″ Floppy Disc and CD storage...
The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 250 MB, and then 750 MB.
The format became the most popular of the superfloppy products which filled a niche market in the late 1990s portable storage market. However, it was never popular enough to replace the 3.5-inch floppy disk. The final versions of the disk reached 750 MB, the capacity available on rewritable CDs, which was far surpassed by the later rewritable DVDs. USB flash drives ultimately proved to be the most popular rewritable storage medium among the general public due to the near-ubiquity of USB ports on personal computers and soon after because of the far greater storage sizes offered. Zip drives fell out of favor for mass portable storage during the early 2000s. The Zip brand later covered internal and external CD writers known as Zip-650 or Zip-CD, which have no relation to the Zip drive.
There were external models and internal models. The external model was a lot sleeker and sexier in my opinion...
Do you guys have any stories about using the zip drive back in the day? Were you even aware this existed? Leave comments below!
Source:
Wikipedia
I had one of those. Boy it was sloooowww!
Yep! I remember it being slow too... Get it going, go make a nice BBQ meal, wash the dishes, come back, almost done! Hooray!
I remember using these in school and was on the first computer my family purchased. A power mac g4 450mhz. Ahh the memories.