The Zip drive is a discontinued removable cartridge disk storage system sold by Iomega from 1995 to 2003. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 megabytes (MB), then 250 MB, and finally 750 MB. The format became the most popular of the superfloppy products, which filled a niche in the late 1990s portable storage market. Nonetheless, it was never popular enough to replace the standard 3+1⁄2-inch floppy disk. Zip drives fell out of favor for mass portable storage during the early 2000s as CD-RW and USB flash drives became prevalent. The Zip brand later covered internal and external compact disc (CD) writers known as Zip-650 or Zip-CD, despite the dissimilar technology.
Overview The Zip drive is a "superfloppy" disk drive that has some of the standard 3½-inch floppy disk drive's convenience, but with much greater capacity options and with performance that is much improved over a standard floppy drive. Zip disk housings are similar to but slightly larger than those of standard 3+1⁄2-inch floppy disks. In the Zip drive, the heads fly over high density media in a manner similar to a hard disk drive. A linear actuator uses the voice coil actuation technology related to modern hard disk drives. The original Zip drive has a maximum data transfer rate of about 1.4 megabytes-per-second (MB/s) (comparable to 8× CD-R; although some connection methods are slower, down to approximately 50 kilobytes-per-second (kB/s) for maximum-compatibility parallel "nibble" mode) and a seek time of 28 milliseconds (ms) on average, compared to a standard 1.44 MB floppy's effective ≈16 kB/s and ≈200 ms average seek time. Typical desktop hard disk drives from mid-to-late 1990s revolve at 5,400 revolutions-per-minute (rpm) and have transfer rates from 3 MB/s to 10 MB/s or more, and average seek times from 20 ms to 14 ms or less. Early generation Zip drives were in direct competition with the SuperDisk (LS-120) drives, which hold 20% more data and can also read standard 3+1⁄2-inch 1.44 MB diskettes, but they have a lower data-transfer rate due to lower rotational speed. The Zip drive was Iomega's third generation of products, different from Iomega's earlier Bernoulli Boxes in many ways, including the absence of the Bernoulli plate of the earlier products.
Interfaces
Zip drives were produced in multiple interfaces including:
IDE True ATA (very early ATA internal Zip drives mostly sold to OEMs; these drives exhibit software compatibility issues because they do not support the ATAPI command set) ATAPI (all Zip generations) USB 1.1 (Zip 100 MB and 250 MB generations) USB 2.0 (Zip 750 MB generation; backwards compatible with USB 1.1 systems) IEEE 1284 (parallel port) with printer pass through (Zip 100 MB and 250 MB generations) (See NB 3) IEEE 1394 (FireWire) (Zip 250 MB and 750 MB generations) SCSI (Zip 100 MB and 250 MB generations; both internal and external editions; external editions limited to ID 5 and 6) "Plus" (Zip 100 MB external drive with both SCSI and IEEE 1284 connections; SCSI ID limited to ID 5 and 6). Parallel port external Zip drives are actually SCSI drives with an integrated Parallel-to-SCSI controller, meaning a true SCSI bus implementation but without the electrical buffering circuits necessary for connecting other external devices. Early Zip 100 drives use an AIC 7110 SCSI controller and later parallel drives (Zip Plus and Zip 250) used what was known as Iomega MatchMaker. The drives are identified by the operating system as "IMG VP0" and "IMG VP1" respectively. Early external SCSI-based Zip drives were packaged with an included SCSI adapter known as Zip Zoom. The Zip Zoom is a relabeled ISA Adaptec SCSI host controller. Also, originally sold separately was a PCMCIA-to-SCSI adapter for laptop compatibility, also a relabeled Adaptec.
Driver support:
MS-DOS (requires a minimum of a 80286 or processor) Windows family (Parallel drives not supported on Windows 7 and above) Some Linux / BSD etc. (not universal) Oracle Solaris 8, 9, 10, 11 IBM OS/2 Macintosh System 6.x,(See NB 1) 7.1–7.5, and Mac OS 7.6–9.2 macOS RISC OS Requires !zip drivers. AmigaOS 3.5 or higher BeOS from version 3 onwards. IRIX 6.4 or higher (SCSI only) NB 3: Requires a driver older than 5.x.
Compatibility Zip disks must be used in a drive with an equal or greater storage capacity. Higher-capacity drives can read lower-capacity media. The 250 MB drive writes much more slowly to 100 MB disks than the 100 MB drive, and the Iomega software is unable to perform a "long" (thorough) format on a 100 MB disk (They can be formatted in any version of Windows as normal; the advantage of the Iomega software is that the long format can format the 100 MB disks with a slightly higher capacity. 250 MB disks format to the same size either way). The 750 MB drive can read and write to 250MB disks, but has read-only support for 100 MB disks. The retroreflective spot differs between the 100 MB disk and the 250 MB such that if the larger disk is inserted in a smaller-capacity drive, the disk is immediately ejected again without any attempt being made to access it. The 750 MB disk has no reflective spot.
Sales, problems, and licensing Zip drives initially sold well after their shipments began in 1995, owing to their low price and high (for the time) capacity. The drive was initially sold for just under US$200 with one cartridge included, and additional 100 MB cartridges for US$20. At this time hard disks typically had a capacity of 500 MB and cost around US$200, and so backing up with Zip disks was very economical for home users—some computer suppliers such as Dell, Gateway and Apple Inc. included internal Zip drives in their machines. Zip drives also made significant inroads in the graphic arts market, as a cheaper alternative to the Syquest cartridge hard disk system. The price of additional cartridges swiftly dropped further over the next few years, as more companies began supplying them. Eventually, the suppliers included Fujifilm, Verbatim, Toshiba and Maxell, Epson and NEC. NEC also produced a licensed 100 MB drive model with its brand name.
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