Remembering Zip Drives - the Trendy Storage Technology of the 1990s

"Despite their initial success, it didn't take long for users to start noticing a major drawback of Zip drives: many times, they would just fail. It wasn't necessarily related to age or any particular misuse of the disks, it just happened. It was a big enough phenomenon that it became known as the "click of death", and once it happened, your drive was gone. The problem was estimated by Iomega to affect around 0.5% of Zip drives, but while that sounds like a small number, when you sell products by the thousands, it becomes fairly widespread. It was a big enough issue that, in September 1998, a class action lawsuit was filed against Iomega for the common problems. Some of the complaints in that lawsuit were eventually dismissed by the court of Delaware, but others were not, and once the public became aware of the problems with Zip drives, it was hard for the brand to make a comeback.

It didn't help that this happened around the same time as formats such as CDs were becoming more popular... And eventually, USB flash drives became the most popular way to carry data around since they were smaller and offered much faster speeds... Eventually, after seeing its profits plummet by the mid-2000s, Iomega was sold to a company called EMC in 2008, and in 2013, EMC and Lenovo formed a joint venture that took over Iomega's business and removed all of the Iomega branding from its products.
The article does note that "as late as 2014, some aviation companies were still using Zip drives to distribute updates for navigation databases." Are there any Slashdot readers who still remember their own Zip drive experiences?

Share your memories in the comments of that once-so-trendy storage technology from the 1990s..."

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story...---the-trendy-storage-technology-of-the-1990s

I used them as expandable storage back in the mid 90's for games. HDD storage was a real concern back then and hard drives cost more back then than they do today (even in modern dollars). 100MB of storage was plenty to put some games on each disc and it was just fast enough to run a game which made it awesome. But of course that fun was short lived as we all remember. Although it would be unfair to characterize Zip drives as being uniquely untrustworthy. I seem to remember in the early to mid 90's that getting more than a couple years life out of a hard drive was considered really lucky. Hard drives didn't really become trust worthy as we know them today until early 2000's.

I.. still have a bunch of disks. I might have a drive somewhere, but not sure if it went away. A few years ago someone asked to borrow the drive because they had a bunch of disks but no drive. Now I may have found myself in the same boat. The data is so old I'm sure it's inconsequential, but it was a 250mb model.

westrock2000 said:

Although it would be unfair to characterize Zip drives as being uniquely untrustworthy.

Click to expand...

What really sucked was that using a bad disk on a good drive would involve a lot of knocking the head against the end stop (the clicking) and that could result in the drive being miscalibrated and damaging the media on good disks that were used with it.

Suddenly, using zip disks in the school computer lab was a bad idea and their utility diminished. LS-120 was kind of cooler because it was also a high precision 1.44 floppy reader.

My uncle had them, they were pretty awesome at the time, he always bought new toys when they came out.

I had a ZIP and a Jazz drive. That dam 1GB disk for the Jazz died and I couldn't afford another one. The ZIP was better than Jazz as it was more common to use for people (and cheaper). I had the SCSI versions so they were actually pretty fast. I also had a parallel ZIP and I just had to stop using it after getting a SCSI version. So slooooow over that parallel port. I also had to get a custom SCSI cable made for HD68 to 25 pin SCSI to use it with the Adaptec - I think it was a U80 or U160 card...been so long I forget.

Zip and Jaz were GREAT ideas with horrible timing. CD's would have killed both drives even if the issues with the media weren't paramount, just in the media cost differential. The biggest problem didn't rear its head until it was too late. Both the Zip AND Jaz suffered from what became known as the "click-of-death." Even worse, a single bad piece of media could destroy a good drive in a single insertion. Another disastrous media problem occurred with the Exabyte Mammoth tape format (and this basically brought down the ENTIRE company) especially the M2. Just inserting a bad tape could destroy the drives heads beyond repair in 1 second. They basically took a consumer 8mm videotape drive and tried to get one or two orders of magnitude more data on the tape. Their "Cleaning Tapes" were essentially sandpaper, to clear off the tape particles that clumped on the heads.

I don't think I ever used a zip drive - I went from 3.5 floppies to CDs to USB jump drives - I remember seeing ads for them all the time in magazines/comics though

Dad had an iomega zip drive, we used one disc for games. 480MB was yuge! It was great, like a usb jump drive before they became really popular. I think I even used one to install an OS before, but maybe I just transferred some drivers.

Unfortunately they went out of style, or maybe fortunately. I don't think ours died like many did, but maybe we just didn't use it enough.

Good old days. I rarely used them. I went straight from floppies to CDs and USB drives. But they were there, I remember them very well.