The Iomega Zip Drive: Exploring The Unsung Hero of 90's Data Storage
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- Опубліковано 3 чер 2024
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Before the days of USB sticks and even affordable CD-Rs, the Iomega Zip Drive was a revolution in personal data storage. I set my old drive up on a Pentium 1 Windows 95 machine and rediscover the joys of Zip Disks!
My retro gaming podcast: theretrohour.com
My Twitter: / danwood_uk
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▬ Contents of this video ▬
0:00 - My Personal Storage Journey
02:28 - Introducing the Iomega Zip Drive
04:00 - Zip Drive Tour and Set Up
05:04 - Zip Disks VS Floppy Disks
06:08 - NordVPN Sponsor Slot
07:34 - Exploring Zip Disks on Windows 95
11:45 - Conclusion
Sources used in this video (with permission or under fair use):
Iomega Zip Drive commercial 1998 - • Iomega Zip Drive comme...
[Commercial] Iomega Zip Drive - • [Commercial] Iomega Zi...
#retro #retrogaming #retrocomputer #storage #90s - Наука та технологія
I used a zip drive heavily in my first job as a IT technician. One disk could store the install files for windows 95, and all the drivers for the varying PC hardware on site. Since most of the PCs did not have CD roms, but all had parallell ports, the zip drive made reinstalling windows 95 (which I had to do a lot) very easy.
I have a vague memory of a certain 'jazz drive' also... Anyone remember this also?
@@jajabinx35 Never owned any of these large removeable storage devices but yes, I remember the name from magazines.
I was a Jaz guy with 1GB cartridges using for graphics work. They all went bad with the "click of death". lol
I have a SCSI model like this for my A1200. It gives a kinda of brutal shunting sound that is the closest to the "click of death" that I've come across. I think it's where the drive read heads hit part of the disk eventually killing it and the drive head itself! I use it sparingly for that reason!
I had one of these during my uni days. I would download as much as I could over a weekend from time to time on the lab computers (internet was dial-up then if you even had it).
A friend and I did this so many times. I used an old camera bag to carry the drive, PSU cables and a bunch of disks. Happy days 🙂
EDIT: Also used to download websites too with web crawler software too. I will still have some somewhere. Of course another option was to have a per-prepared folder of games and tools to share files over the network in order to set some computers up in the lab to "research" Doom, Quake and Shadow Warrior 😉
Also moved on to CD's in the end myself, the zip drive was still useful for getting data though even with the writer. But the writer was great for long term storage of those download runs.
The ZIP was something I always wanted as a kid. It was amazing. God. I wish Floppy/Cartridge storage was still a thing.
I wanted it when I first heard of it. Dream. HDD was gaining space so fast at that time, so fast. No need for that that turbo floppy.
I remember fantasizing about those Floptical drives.. but they never took off either
SD cards
@@charlibiris Not big enough. I don't mean data wise, I mean physically. They need to be bigger.
The problem was cartridges are easy to pirate. Nintendo has issues. and even rom from Action Replay III can be dumped to adf/Amoiga Forever or other emulators today.. I think they saw it was far too easy to dump rom images. not to mention they had limited memory onboard, (which probably make that part easy anyway)
Zip drives where a revolution... apart from the dreadful click of death. I still remember thinking why wasnt it replacing the old 1.44 mb floppy drives... then i got my first cd burner which eventualy ended up as better way to store big chunks of data at the time.
Very cool stuff Dan. NO way was the Zip a failed format. It just had a niche. Anyone in Graphic design loved them. Even when CD-Rs came out, they were £10 per disk with a 25% failure rate depending on your writer and the machine it was plugged in to. The zip was much more reliable by contrast, and reusable. I had no idea that it would work on an Amiga. Didn't even consider it. I may have to get one :D Loved your Story about writing a story based on Another World. I did the same thing funny enough. I wrote a story for English, on my Amiga, but mine was based on Mercenary. Was the longest and most detailed piece I'd ever submitted lol. Great video as always mate. Always look forward to your work. Keep it up.
Oh man, a Zip drive was something I could only dream of owning back then.
Oh the Click of Death was very common. The trouble was that once a disk went full on CoD, it would “infect” any drive you used it in, slowly degrading that drive. So the more you “shared” drives and disks, the more likely your system would succumb. I have had five drive and three of them had it. Two internal IDEs, one parallel external (got it fixed by Iomega under warranty twice) and one scsi drive. But I do believe it was an issue primarily on the older 100Meg models. The 250 and 750 models had disks fail and click but it didn’t spread.
It's very interesting to hear from someone, who actually used these devices. I remember reading articles in some Polish Amiga magazine about ZIP Drive, but never could afford one. But I remember carrying parts of the Internet on 720kb (pc format) discs and reading them on my Amiga 1200 :)
I would love to see how ZIP drive worked in Amiga environment!
I still absolutely love the look of the original external 100MB drive. I wish I had kept my drive and disks from the 90's but at least I was able to snag a few parallel drives, a few IDE drives, and a box of disks for next to nothing in recent years. I used Zip disks to back up my hard drives for years and always enjoyed the process. Never had a disk fail on me.
Wasn't expecting a new video this fast. Great to see you uploading again.
Such a cool piece of tech. Perhaps it's the flashing lights, colour, viewing window allowing you to see the label on the inserted disk, but old floppy storage like this is just so much cooler than SD cards and solid state storage devices we have today. The latter not being cool in any way at all I might add. Miss gear like this. Great vid.
I think I’m probably 15 years older than you are, and I started computing as a 14 yo in 1978. We used 8” floppies which held almost nothing. Only games came on cassettes, but then again, we all had to write our own apps back then. Fast for ward to the Zip disk - I loved these. I put everyone in my company onto these, and those were just the 100mg version. Truly loved the 250s. But, no sooner we’re they then they were replaced. Amazing the pace of tech.
Great job Dan as always. Zip drives were a massive leap in storage for the price, a game changer in being able to carry a lot of info without breaking the bank. We wouldn’t be where we are now without the bridge they built.
Back in the mid 90's - around 95 / 96 I worked for an insurance company in Manchester city center as there IT Manager and lead developer - I was only 23!!! I bought 3 of these for our daily backups at the head office - this was before we had a network installed - so we would back up the 3 main development machines in a good old son / father / grandfather process - they were an absolute god send for us - then we got Novell Netware - but still used one of the drives to backup the server!!
I bought one as soon as I saw them. I was using an A1200 with an 80mb hard disk and adding the Zip would mean 100mb extra. I used to boot Mac OS with Shapeshifter off a Zip, they were pretty reliable. I think I only ever had one disk go bad.
Ah, I did the same - it was great to be able to fit a bootable Mac OS installation plus a bunch of applications and utilities onto a removable disk for use with ShapeShifter, and it was fast enough to be usable.
Great video and brought back some memories! We used these mainly at work to back up files for accounts and to transfer large graphics files. One of the advantages the Zip Drive had was that it was re-writable AND reliable with a robust case. Using CDs in this way always felt a bit wasteful if they were single write and of course, they could be damaged easily.
2 Dan Wood videos in a week! A real treat ❤
I always loved and still love the eject sound of the drive. It sound very heavy and mechanically still have a working drive in one of our PCs today
They were much more the hero of sneakernet data transport because as with floppies we expected Zip disks and drives to fail. Fortunately for me the only Zip disks I worked with were in the Air Force so replacements and drives were always handy.
BTW custom among the wise was to burn CDs at the slowest possible write speed (free trial versions limited to 1X did that nicely) which I still do. The slower the write the easier a bootable CD/DVD is read without errors.
Thank you Dan. Another one of your videos which takes me back to when I was probably most happy!
Did an art degree in the late 90s and everyone had Zip discs to save digital work on. The Macs in the illustration suite all had Zip drives. It filled a gap at the time before USB sticks caught on in the 2000s.
Ah yea, G4's with the built in drives that always jammed.
I proudly own one (the parallell port version)...and a few disks. It is a gem. Never gonna toss it away. If it works today or not have no clue.
I bought a parallel port Zip drive and leather carrying case when it came out mid-1990's while in college. It was a staggering success and quite popular. I also downloaded on the campus computer labs high speed network and brought disks back to my own computer with pokey dial up. It was a massive improvement over spanning files over multiple floppies. I upgraded to external Jaz when it came out and added the companies SCSI controller to my Dell, while the campus engineering workstations (NT & Unix) had built in SCSI. Never had a problem. 2 years ago I started collecting Zip 100/250/750 Parallel/SCSI/USB/1394 drives, Click USB drives, Syquest SCSI drives, Castlewood SCSI/USB drives, and LS120/LS240 USB/SCSI drives. Nostalgia. Super video. Bring back good times, simpler times.
Another enjoyable video dan
.a mate had the 100 meg one and I was well impressed how much u could store on it. I never had one myself
You really are back! :D Not sure I can get through another Zip Drive video without finally getting one. We'll see I guess.
Love the Zip drive, used it from about 96 - 2008 or so :) The Zip 100 is a techs best friend for older computers :)
This is awesome! Deliciously old-school. But then again, I love old-school technology. I still use zip disks, including an ATAPI 100MB drive on my main computer (a desktop), and I recently got an old LPT 250MB zip drive working on this system. It's 1/3 as fast as the built-in 100MB drive, but it reads/writes 250MB disks. Love it!
I still have 2 of those Zip drives. Both working fine after 25 years. I even have some sealed disks as well. I use them on my Xp pc and Win98 Compaq lte laptop nowadays. Back then I was the only one in my friends group who had one. So media exchange was still done on HD floppies🤓
I loved my little ZIP drive, in fact, I still have it. Used it quite a bit when working, (I'm retired now), and still have it packed away and stored in the garage.
I still have some disks and internal and external drives lying around. My first was an external, parallel port model, and hoo boy that thing was slow. The 1 gb Jaz drive followup was amazing; they came with a scsi card.
In the early 90's a mate lend me his zip drive with disks full of software.. good times. I recently bought one myself for retro project purposes. It's still a load of fun!
When i went to college around 2001 2002 all PCs in the lab had Zip drives. I ended up buying one for my dorm room PC so that I could use the Internet connection at college to download stuff and bring it home. Soon after USB flash drives really took off
Used Zip Drives and disks a lot from almost their introduction to around 2002 or 2003 when USB Sticks started to operate in the same price range. Had an internal IDE version in my PC at home and a parallel port external one to take with me to university or use it on my laptop - and as you have said, I absolutely don't think of it as a failed storage system. They are/were very reliant and opened up loads of possibilites in data exchange for an affordable price, especially for school kids and students.
Used my 1st gen SCSI Zip drive until about 2005 when USB flash drives became more common.
On the Amiga, I used it solely as a hard drive with one disk for games, and one disk for productivity stuff.
I only ever bought one extra disk for university work.
Bless this unsightly blue monstrosity.
The Iomega Zip Drive was a great bit of kit, had an external and internal version back in the day. Really was an alternative to burning cds for smaller amounts of data.
Dan Videos!!! Woohoo! The first retro video I ever watched on YT. A Dan vid.
Thank you for sharing your memories! Those were the days!
Great Vid!! Lucky that you got so much data off of those! I had 15 zip discs all full of data from back in the day, I pulled the data about 2018 and about 6 of them read right, and 9 were either toast, or I only got a handful of files.. no click of death from what I recall, just loads of read errors.
Yeah, loved my zip drive! Remember being super impressed with it at the time, and it did look really cool on the desk
Bought my Zip drive in '96 at college & loved it. It was amazing -- 100 whole megs on just 1 disk?! ;) I had a clunky PC at the time & got the parallel port version. Fortunately for me a friend needed the portability of the one I got & traded his IDE internal for my external one. I used it until the early 2000s. Never developed the click of death & never had a problem with mine. I wish I still had it around, but I sold it and all the disks a loooong time ago.
Thanks Dan. Your video's and podcast keep my youth alive. Wonderful times.
It was during my early years in the pre-press "industry".
From hand made mockups we went to digital eps files...almost overnight!!! We were informed that we were finally able to send postscript files from programs like Core, Photopaint , Pagemaker in large disks. Initially we used Iomega Bernoulli drives 10-20MB. Since not all the printing studios had Bernoulli drives we had to carry our drive with the disk! After a while everyone started using Scsi Zip drives. At home I had a really slow parallel zip drive (it took ~30 mins to fill one 100mb disk). Finally the IDE 250MB zip drive became standard from graphic artists until the CD burners became really cheap!
Thanks Dan you have encouraged me to breakout my Zip drive thanks.
I had two Iomega ZIP 100 drives. The same parallel version that you show in your video, and an internal IDE for my Amiga 4000. I used the parallel at school to download big files, and transfer them to my Amiga via the IDE drive. It was back in 1999-2000 :) I sold the drives and disks 2-3 years ago. The disks them self are today still popular.
I have exactly the same Trust speakers using them from 1994 until now!! Incredible quality.
I bought a parallel port ZIP drive back in the day and it was so useful! I would ride my bike to friends, but also sneak into the computer lab at our university because of exploring the Internet. With friends, we would swap games on DOS computers. I needed a DOS driver on floppy disk, but once loaded you could backup entire games collections. From the early Internet I was getting emulators, think DOS version of MAME and emulators for R-Type and other games :D
yeah I was a zip fan. Was using them at work in the mid 90s at a film and tv production company. There was also the Jaz disc that came later with 1GB capacity
One of the coolest devices of the 90s. The translucent USB model was awesome. I was tech lead on a storage software product and customers used to try to RAID Zip drives together.
Yes Dan, back with more vids, long overdue Sir!!!
Oh the click of death was very real. I have several disks that click randomly while in use. 8 out of the 50 Macs in my high school had scsi zip drives. They were trashed by other students and at least two drives would permanently kill any disk inserted.
I have piles of zip100s zip250s and a couple of zip750s and at least one of each drive.
I still have my Zip100 drive, external parallel port version, bought in the mid 1990's. I only bought around 10 disks, so I still have all of that too. I just had to make sure I set my PC parallel port speed to EPP/ECP for fastest throughput. The good thing is that I bought my drive in the mid 1990's instead of the late 1990's because that is when the Click of Death began. As the Zip drive became viral & popularly trended, more people demanded it & thus for Iomega to get their maximum potential profits from this high demand from consumers, they had to make shortcuts in quality control to roll them down the assembly line faster. Thus the death click. I bypassed all of that by luckily getting the early batches a few years prior when the Zip was just starting & there was not much demand yet. As Ben Franklin once said, "Haste makes waste". The Click of Death is a primary testimony & proof of that quotation. Over 25 years later I still have all of that Zip stuff, along with a piggy-back "Zip Unleashed!" battery backup, bought at Fry's Electronics (RIP), which I am currently repairing (dead Ni-Cd batteries). I had also found & bought for cheap an internal IDE version of the Zip100 about 10 years ago at Goodwill. The speed comparison between the parallel port & IDE version is like night & day, as the IDE version is like 50-100 times faster, as an eyeball guess. I never got into Iomega's later products, such as the Zip250 & Jaz drives, because as aforementioned in the video, the writable & rewritable CD/DVD became more practical & cheaper, of which I still use today, even these days when optical discs are being touted as getting more obsolete.
I also still have all my Commodore 8-bit C-64 stuff, including 2 Datasettes, plus all my floppy disks, manuals, magazines, etc. And as also seen in the video, my browser of choice over 2 decades ago was Netscape Navigator. In a way, Netscape still exists today, in the form of Mozilla. And the modern browser that still is getting used & updated today that looks exactly like Navigator, is Mozilla Seamonkey, which I also use. But I do miss the Y2k era, browsing the Internet on 56k dialup on Netscape browser, because it's not just that technology that I miss, but also my youth.
God I remember those zip disks, Thank-you for the video dan
I had more fun seeing the old files on your zip disks than the actual content of the video. I love digital archeology - going through old digital content on old drives to see what was thought important enough to save on a storage medium with limited space. Seeing the old video game sites, the hacker's manifesto, the spice girls images, even your rip off short story of another world was fun to pause and read. I wish I had my old zip disks from back then to sift through.
We had zip100 drives at work in the mid 90s. I get one internal IDE drive for home, so I could trasfer stuff from and to work (that time I didn't have a CD writer or internet at home until 1999-2000) Last year I found the drive and the disks, sadly my USB-IDE adapter that works just fine with HDDs wasn't able to connect the zip-drive but whan I dug out an old core2 machine with IDE i could check them. All the disks still works just fine. It was a great device carrying data around.
I used & loved the Zip drive back in the mid to late 90s. It stored so much more than the original floppy disks,.. it wasn't as much as the Iomega Jazz drive, but decent for normal text files, and smaller jpeg photo files.
After the anouncement, iomega pushed the date forward and forward, but finally I got the scsi version at release date. It was amazing, blue, fast, great stuff. Loved it, until the click of death… I still got it and recently copied all the disks to images using a zuluscsi. Great video, thanks 😊
This brings memories. Amazingly I never worked with a Zip drive. I have no idea how I avoided them. But I do remember installing Windows 3.11 on a 20MB Floptical just for the laugh. It was slow, but quite fun to see that it actually worked. The big selling point of Flopticals was that they would read and write standards 1.44MB 3½" floppies, which was something you more or less had to be able to do at the time. So with a Floptical drive you could get both "high capacity" disks and floppy support in the same drive. The Zip drive however wasn't compatible with standard floppy disks, so you needed at the least two drives. Actually a lot of computers still came with a 5.25" Floppy drives in addition to the "new" 3.5" floppy drives. So with a Zip disk added you could be looking at three drives, so a floptical cutting that down to two was quite an interesting proposition. A few years later the flopticals were up to 120MB but they still never became more than a foot note in computer history.
Now if we are to talk about fun machines then I'd say the Motorola machines I worked with was pretty weird as they booted of tape. They used a QIC-24 drive, if I remember correctly, and booted into Unix System-V from it.
So just how I managed to avoid the Zip Drive I have no idea.
I had the parallel port version, loved it, I only had a few disks but I would take the whole setup every where i went
It was the other way round for me, I first had a (very expensive) 2x speed Phillips CD-recorder on my Pentium-1 at home, then went to uni where every PC boasted a Zip-drive and had to buy a Zip-drive and carry Zip-disks around for uni stuff, and also to carry home all the cool stuff I downloaded from the ultra-fast internet connection at the uni library.
exactly the same way i used ZIP Drive ! at university we had paralel port version and me in my student home had scsi version on amiga. so i spend as much time as possible to download at university and watch at home. great memories. spiv/infect (Amiga Demoscene)
I was still a kid during the 90's and young teen during earlier years of the 2000's but whenever I saw my math teacher - who also happened to teach computer science at my school of the time - grabbing this exact Zip drive I always wanted to have one myself.
Call it nostalgia but to have data on cartridges (as in GameBoy) or diskettes still feels really cool to me to transport data.
Granted, these days everything is connected through this weird thing they call the Internet (a sentence actually not that ironic considering there are many more layers to the world wide web than just to browse websites and watch cat videos) but I can't deny the feeling of coping data using this physical media is still fascinating.
By the way, Dan, love your podcast!
Would have been great to see the ZIP Drive working on the Amiga. I had an IDE one on mine running with IDEFIX97 and it worked great (until the click of death). Being able to carry 100mb around and it would load fast as well was just epic.
I too did my homework on Wordsworth on the Amiga and then imported into college PCs running Word 95. But I actually saved my work as rich text format rather than plain text and it usually maintained the text formatting bold etc.
Also you unlocked a memory where you wrote your English homework based on Another World! I did exactly the same thing but with Syndicate! My English teacher also had no idea what a puersadatron was or a gauss gun etc so totally got away with stealing some creativity haha!
I loved it. Had internal and external unit. I have a ton of new old stock internals in my basement.
Yes!!!
I had a SCSI hooked up to my 2-floppy A500 BBS, just before I bought an internal 2.5" hard drive for it. I don't remember the size, but I can find out later and edit here...
Now I have 2 SCSI Zip drives, as well as a USB Zip drive, but need to remember how to configure for the Amiga; I no don't think that I have the install disk.
Still got a few of these. IDE, SCSI hooked up to 90s rack mounted music kit and one in my Amiga Tower. They were amazing when they came out, I used to go to an Internet cafe and fill it up with Aminet downloads in Manchester. Never had one disk fail
I was still using an Atari ST when these came out, and by the time I moved to PCs around 1998, the CD seemed to be the way forward. But I always absolutely loved the look of the ZIP disks -- there was something uniquely mid-1990s about it that reminded me of films like "Hackers". I'd like to get a hold of one now for my Ataris and Archimedes.
great video I run my bbs off a zip drive and still have some of my maxbbs stuff on aminet.
I still have some zip drives and zip disks. I even have an un-sealed pack of 5 disks. I lusted after these things back in the day and really only wanted them on my Amiga, transferring files etc. Everything still works! the only thing I want to do, but will probably never get around to doing is making some labels to stick on the disks.
Dear friend,
I am a 42 year old viewer from Greece. My first computer was an Amstrad CPC 464 and I have always been a retro computer enthusiast, mainly because I think that some of the old programming languages and games were technically better in some aspects than modern ones.
I have carefully watched all your videos with no exception and I feel that I have to pay my respects for your marvelous work!!! I have enjoyed every single word you have said so far and I will always impatiently check your channel for new content.
Let me give my best regards with a long and friendly meoooooow!
Yours faithfully,
A humble white cat from Greece
I've got a parallel Zip drive and USB Zip drive on top of my Athlon 64. No internal drive though. Great video covering these!
I just remember I had a parallel Zip drive to copy RISC OS files from my Acorn to my ‘Bush Internet Surf Set’ which was a set top box for browsing the net that was really an Acorn Archimedes but the full desktop was not in ROM but the Zip drivers were so it could be loaded from there 😀
Still use them now. Got a SCSI version for my vintage Apples (IIgs and Mac SE30) and a matching USB version for the PC to transfer files!
Have one also must give it a run up some time. Ahh good days. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Very lucky. Both my Zip 100 drives died due to click of death. Even in the used market, many also suffered the same symptoms.
I loved my Zip drive I got a special bag made only for it and a few disks. I got it everywhere. 100Mb can seem tiny today but it was huge back then.
Mine used the parallel port.
And no never anyone of them failed.
I still have the parallel Zip drive that I bought in the late 90s/early noughts. In addtion, I’ve acquired a SCSi and an USB version to transfer stuff onto my vintage Mac. I also have an internal IDE version, waiting for a suitable project.
Very nice. Bought one myself recently thinking it was a parallel drive but was actually a SCSI drive. I wasn't mad though as I've been wanting to experiment with SCSI anyway. Speaking of SCSI, if you have a classic Mac, the SCSI ZIP drive is really handy to install OSes or just move files with. I know that Adrian Black does it all the time.
I didn't use Zip back when it was popular, as CD-R's already existed and were worth less per blank than Zip's. Burners were more expensive, but paid for themselves over the long term. I only began utilizing Zip's recently, having a number of vintage synthesizers, that support them. And an internal PC one with an IDE interface, makes transferring music to the computer a breeze. External ones - I just love the designs. I have the same SGI color scheme styled one and a transparent plexiglass version. I've seen a bunch of SCSI ones at thrift stores, but the transfer speeds are so slow, the only reason to have one, is to make it interface with something like an old Roland sequencer, that may only have external SCSI, and nothing else...
I had these for my Acorn RiscPC and Archimedes and internal ones for my PC allowing me to transfer large files easily between them. This wasn't a failed format, just became redundant when large USB drives became available for most, but since my RiscPC and Archimedes didn't have USB, these disks were still very useful. Never had one fail but I was always worried about storing critical data on such media.
I love this channel so much
I remember this well I had the external, then I put in an internal one, after that one, which I liked the most, was the 1gb version, It is the Iomega JAZ 1GB, Not sure if I still have that is some boxes , I know the pc is gone with the internal drive. All I have left from those days is my commadore 64 and amiga 500. brings back a lot of memories. From the sounds of it I got 10 yrs on you, I was a teenager in 86
I remember using these before CD-R were a thing. Super convenient to bring software to LAN parties to share.
Then came the first CD writers (1x first, and they were expensive, so not too many of my friends had one 😂), and the ZIP drive sat somewhere in a cupboard to take dust…
That's what I did as well. CD-R could hold 8x what a ZIP 100 could and was so much cheaper!
@@CarsandCats these were the days :)
Back in the mid 90's I had a CMD hard drive for my C128. Basically it was a standard (for that era) SCSI hard drive in a case with electronics that made it compatible with Commodore's serial IEEE-488 bus. One nice feature of the drive is that it had another built in SCSI port that could be used to daisy chain other devices. So, I put my SCSI Zip Drive on the port & used it to store tons of Commodore games & other software. It was really quite great. Unfortunately a few years ago the CMD drive failed and I've never really gotten around to try & repair it. For now, all those games and demos are inaccessible. Hopefully someday I will overcome my laziness and give repairing the drive a shot. I still have all the Zip discs in a very stylish 90's era media holder.
'Blobby' CDs with all the cracked games on them. My mates house every Sunday transferred what I wanted from those. They had some ingenious tricks with the CDs like 'shake rattle and roll' etc.
Had one, it was a Parallel version i used at work, it was next to the printer behind me on the end of a 5 meter cable, had the ZIP and printer plugged in, and worked fine. Also had an internal version on the PC.... really sad the Sony LS120 drive never took off, which was a 120Mb floppy disk drive that also read floppy disks, way better than the ZIP drive and would plug in to the floppy port. Only found a few motherboards that supported that, seemed way better though.
the zip drive still seems exciting. I remember using them as late as 2002 because I was taking them to work at rockstar, then taking them back to use on my amiga :)
I got one of the first Zip drives and connected it with SCSI to my Amiga 4000. Later I got the follow-up Jaz drive with 1GB capacity. I think both are still up in the loft.
Hi Dan,
The Iomega Zip drive got me through University, a lifesaver. It is 1995, and doing graphic design, I soon realised the humble 1.4MB floppy wouldn't cut it as I worked on 20-30MB PhotoShop files. University did provide SyQuest drives, but these had a reputation for being highly unreliable. The Iomega ZIP had been on the market for less than a year, and it was getting glowing reviews in the tech magazines, also, the discs held more data than SyQuests. So, a few of us purchase a ZIP drive. At the time, there were only two models: Parallel and SCSI. As I had a Macintosh, I went with SCSI. Naturally, we were blown away by the speed and capacity of the ZIP drive. In the five-plus years of using ZIP, I think I had one failure. I feel the reputation of the unreliability of the ZIP drive is unjustified. Now, the Iomega Jaz on the other hand... awful reliability. I stopped using ZIP in favour of CD-Rs etc, later, DVD-Rs.
Internal ZIP drives first appeared in the Power Macintosh 6400 model, in 1996. Once Apple started to include internal ZIP drives, we knew we made the right choice to back the format.
Definitely not a failure. Everyone I knew had one!
I think I got my external Zip drive back in late 90's and had it for a year before I bought my first CD burner. I ended up selling the drive to my best friend and hadn't seen it since. I was convinced that the Zip disk format (and later the Jazz) format was going to replace the standard 3.5 inch floppies, but then CD burners were becoming faster and more affordable. I'm currently using a Blu-Ray burner for backups.
Zip was a smashing success and those writers who call it a failed format/storage type never experienced it when it came out and are instead desk jockeys copying what others have claimed. I lived through it and let me tell you compared to floppy disks, zip was a godsend.
Thanks Dan Wood, my 2nd computer was the Amiga 500, and I still have a Zip drive. I tried to fire up my old Windows computer a couple of years ago, but I now believe the computer clock batteries expired. Do you know of a USB to parallel port adapter? I still have about 25 Zip Drive disks and would like to store contents on a modern hard disk . Thanks for the video have a nice week.
It would be worth of mentioning it was well supported on Amiga, Mac and I believe even Atari, even you did mention you have used them to transfer files to Miggy :D
This was like half the storage of my fancy Amiga 500 200MB SCSI HDD. LOL Of course it was a must-have!
I had a ripped version of windows 95/8 like tiny11 today running off a zip drive, i thought LS120 had them screwed but no what a surprise. I did get the click of death on maybe 1 or 2 Zips, LS120 almost all got it at some point
These things really come in handy when tinkering with 80s/early 90s Macs!
I remember connecting one of these to the SCSI port on the back of my A590 - it had 5x the capacity and 6x the speed of the hard drive itself.
I still have several working zip drives along with new un opened discs(usb,parallel & ide). Now you want to go back farther? I also have an iomega bernouli 20 + 20 drive, as far as the zip. I remember the dreaded click of death!
So curious, seems like the whole internet loved the Zip drive. We pooled our money and got a community CD-R drive in 1994, then later as prices went down in 96-97, we started buying personal ones. Only saw one Zip drive in the 90s. :-)