Which will probably fail again shortly. Floppies, yes, zips no, in my experience. Apart from the infamous and somewhat hyped Click of Death which I never experienced, I'm happy to say Zips seem pretty robust to me. I'm still using the first pair of Mb disks I bought something like 5 years ago.
I may have reformatted them once or twice, but I can pull them out of a dusty drawer and they just seem to work. So it is written, and so it shall be. So using Zip drives on those machines is the path of least resistance.
I have about 50 zip disks at work that various people have brought to me over the years. Haven't received a new one in at least a year and a half. My Zip drive is sitting on the window sill I moved over to CD. Oh and I have the terribly slow 40MB Clik! Why are there no Firewire keyrings?! Iomega killed the Zip when they didn't make the backwards compatible. I'm sorry, we still have a huge installed base of zip s and almost as many zip s and you want us to go to a drive that won't write those disks any more?
Zip disks are fairly reliable for the first couple years of their life. After that I wouldn't trust one any more than a floppy. The main difference is that there are tons of 10 year old floppy disks out there that people still use. And they die all the time. Zip disks being a new technology we're just starting to see how well they hold up to the test of time.
We had one professor here lose all the data on a zip disk, she didn't have most of it backed up. I says to her "you need to back this stuff up, keep a copy here at work and one at home, use the zip disk to transfer the data back and forth, don't store it on the disk" A month later she lost most of the data off another zip disk, and of course that wasn't backed up either.
Never mind carrying your only copy of data around is a bad idea, it can get stolen, lost, dropped, etc. They fitted a nice niche during a brief period when CD-R drives and media were still relatively expensive - and the CD-R software was a bit crap. Having a mb floppy-ish sized piece of media was fairly useful. Now though, we should be striving as a forum community to phase them out!
More seriously, when you can hang mb from your keychain, and CD-Rs are dirt cheap, their time has basically come and gone. For archival purposes, we used those huge removable discs in big, clunky, plastic enclosures SyQuest or something? I've found that a good use for zips is for redundant archiving of important files.
Having stored a number of cd-rw disks and found many of them corrupted and unreadable I decided to use an extra drive on each machine to store valuable files and to back them up to zip. The zips are easily stored in a firesafe box along with another harddrive and some cd-rws. Zip proved phenomenally successful during its first year on the market. In fact, Iomega had trouble keeping up with the demand for both drives and disks.
Its deep indigo color stood out in a world of beige PCs and Macs. Small and light, the drive measured about 7. You inserted the power plug at a right angle. It followed a deep channel out to the back of the unit to prevent accidental unplugging when the drive was reading or writing data. You could see the label of an inserted disk without ejecting it thanks to a window on top of the drive.
Iomega later introduced an internal version of the ZIP drive that fit in a standard 5. Measuring 4 x 4 x 0. They had a hard, rugged shell with a spring-loaded metal shutter. Like the 3. But unlike the floppy, this disk spun at a very high 2, RPM, which allowed the much faster data transfer rates. Over its lifespan, the Zip brand had three disk sizes.
This drive utilized MB disks but remained backward-compatible with the and MB disks. This captured attention in the press, but it arrived too late to make much of a difference in the market. In , Iomega introduced Clik! It utilized very small approximately 2 x 2 x 0. Each disk held 40 MB of data. The format was intended to be used with small personal electronic devices, such as digital cameras and portable music players. Iomega tried several times to build on the Zip technology and brand, and diversify its product line.
One of its most notable items remains the HipZip But its lackluster interface software and heavy competition from hard-drive-based players rendered it unsuccessful. FotoShow —a glorified MB Zip drive with a composite TV output that served up still image slideshows from Zip disks—was another interesting attempt. It was intended for business presentations and people who wanted to show their family photos on a TV. While it was a clever idea, its clunky, slow software held it back.
Not long after launch, Zip disks found a killer application with graphic designers who commonly used Macs. The disks became the de facto standard for transferring high-resolution artwork between machines or to printshops. After most of the world had forgotten about Zip disks, graphic designers still commonly used them. By the end of the decade, you could get one for just a few cents.
ZipCD initially sold well, but it quickly gained a bad reputation for unreliability. Businesses also started installing local area networks LANs in ever-increasing numbers. LANs allowed large file transfers between machines without any removable media at all.
At that point, Zip disks had already become largely irrelevant for most people. Amazingly, though, even 25 years later, Zip is not entirely dead. According to Wikipedia , some aviation companies still use Zip disks to distribute data updates for airplane navigation systems. For a while, vintage computer enthusiasts Atari, Mac, Commodore also often used SCSI Zip drives to quickly transfer data, although that has now largely been replaced by flash media interfaces.
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You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. Thread starter Dark Prodigy Start date Mar 31, Dark Prodigy Jawbreaker. Joined Mar 10, Messages 2, And it still works.
Just wondering if anyone still uses this still and does anyone sell the disks for it anymore. Gnu Limp Gawd. Joined Oct 12, Messages USB flash drives are the new zip drive. DeathFromBelow Supreme [H]ardness. Joined Jul 15, Messages 7, I've still got a couple of drives and a few disks lying around, but I haven't used them for years.
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