Does anyone use ZIP™ drives anymore?

D

Dark Prodigy

Jawbreaker
Joined
Mar 10, 2006
Messages
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I'm messing around with an old system of mine that came with an Iomega® 100MB Built-In Zip Drive. And it still works. Just wondering if anyone still uses this still and does anyone sell the disks for it anymore.



 
I've still got a couple of drives and a few disks lying around, but I haven't used them for years. They never caught on because of the cost compared to CDs and reliability issues, and USB flash drives have made them obsolete.

I think you can still buy disks online at Newegg, ZZF, etc.
 
My stepfather uses them at work to do backups of documents and whatnot. Think he has all zip250 drives.
 
If it works, and you can get discs for it use it. Just don't pay $$$$ for the discs. :)
 
Man, what a sad story. Iomega could have become the new floppy and ruled the world if they had sold a cheaper drive, and hadn't gouged people on the media (TEN BUCKS for a zip disk!).

But as it is, they gave CD burners and USB drives a foothold, and lost miserably.

The company I work for used to use Zip drives in almost EVERY computer (thousands of machines), but they've been phased out because the CD-R/RW and DVD-R is so much more versatile and cheap.
 
The drives and disks are still sold, even in retail stores. I actually bought a Zip 100 drive last year, got a decent deal for it, because I had a lot of zip disks from years ago and no functioning drive and just wanted to know what was on the disks!

Yeah, flash drives are the new zip disk. DVD-RAM would be the closest optical analog to a zip disk. I like DVD-RAM, but its not as portable as flash disk, as not every computer has an optical drive capable of reading them. Every computer has a USB port these days.
 
Thankfully use of the Zip drive is at a minimum these days. It was crap technology back then, and it's worse now.

The reason I say it's crap, is because a Zip drive is little more than a floppy disk on steroids and it has all the weaknesses and disadvantages of the technology it was based on. Drives like the Jazz, Syjet, SparQ, and EZ-Flyer were FAR superior as they used removable hard drive platters and thus provided better performance and didn't wear out as quickly.
 
I had and still have a IDE Zip drive. I bought it back in the 1997 I think. I figured it was the greatest thing to come along until I learnt that it wasn't too reliable. I still have the drive in my collection somewhere and the 3 original disks I bought. Once CD-R came along, I never used it again.
 
Zip drive disks were built like tanks compared to the Orb drive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orb_Drive

The disks would fail if there were subjected to any kind of shock. A 2-ft drop was plenty to kill one. But damn were they cheap for the capacity (2.2GB, huge at the time for removable r/w with random access). We used this for backup at one point, but switched to DVDs eventually.
 
I wouldn't mess around with zip disks, for the cost of a disk you can get a flash drive for a lot less, just my 2 cents. If you have disks and the drive it might make sense to use it still. Flash works almost everywhere though where you can't take a zip disk everywhere.
 
Did any one ever? I didn't think anybody found them cost-effective.

I went straight to Jaz drives, though it only took about 18 months for those to be obsolete, too.

You can probably find media and drives on eBay, or at your local computer recycling center, for a buck a piece.
 
I never used zip drives because I never knew if the computer I was going to use had a zip drive in it >.>

Whereas I knew that 99% of the time that the school/public computers would have floppy drives. When the CD-R came out I switched to that instead.
 
I have heard the "Click of death" many times over the years. I do midi based production on an Akai MPC2000 XL and it came with an internal zip drive. I have never had issues with that drive (Knocks on wood) in the 4 years I have owned the machine, however I am on my second drive for my PC. The second one is an external USB drive and it has worked great. Those disks were like $15.00 for the 100MB back in the day.
 
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