Remembering Zip Drives - the Trendy Storage Technology of the 1990s (xda-developers.com) 173
Back in the 1990s, floppy disks "had a mere capacity of 1.44MB," remembers XDA Developers, "which would soon become absolutely tiny for the increasingly large pieces of software that would come about."
Floppy disks also felt quite fragile, and while we got "superfloppy" formats that were physically larger and had more capacity, those were pretty unwieldy as portable storage. Enter 1994, when a company called Iomega introduced its variant of a "superfloppy", the Zip drive... [T]he initial capacity introduced in 1994 reached a whopping 100MB, which was huge number when put up against the traditional floppy disk. Zip drives also had major performance benefits, with read speeds that could average 1.4MB/s, as opposed to the comparatively sluggish 16kB/s speeds of a traditional floppy disk, as well as a seek time of around 28ms seconds, whereas a floppy disk averaged 200ms. Zip drives weren't quite as fast as desktop HDDs, but for portable storage, this was a huge step forward...
[I]n 1998, Iomega introduced the Zip 250 disks, which increased the capacity to 250MB, and, already in the new millennium, we got the Zip 750, which took that further to 750MB... It was an appealing enough proposition that big computer manufacturers like Dell started including a Zip drive in some of their PCs. Even Apple included Zip drives in some of its Power Macintosh models from the mid-to-late 90s. However, things started to shift towards the end of the decade as other portable formats rose to prominence, most notably CDs and USB flash drives.
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...
[I]n 1998, Iomega introduced the Zip 250 disks, which increased the capacity to 250MB, and, already in the new millennium, we got the Zip 750, which took that further to 750MB... It was an appealing enough proposition that big computer manufacturers like Dell started including a Zip drive in some of their PCs. Even Apple included Zip drives in some of its Power Macintosh models from the mid-to-late 90s. However, things started to shift towards the end of the decade as other portable formats rose to prominence, most notably CDs and USB flash drives.
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...
I owned three. (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a Zip 100 (SCSI), a Zip 250 (SCSI), and towards the end I got one of the low-profile USB-powered drives. I didn't ever get the click of death. Actually I still have all three of them in storage now I think, and since one is USB I might be able to theoretically recover any data I have on disks still. Zip drives were great when I first got into it since my PC at the time was a Mac IIsi with a hard disk of only 120 Megabytes.
Re:I owned three. (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't ever get the click of death.
I think the device's vulnerability to it depended on the revision. Not to mention that, if I recall correctly - and it was a while ago - the problem could actually be with the disks rather than the drive. Or rather, the problem was basically infectious. It was caused by the drive heads overextending, but damage on the disks could cause the drive heads to overextend, damaging the mechanism. The thing is, those damaged mechanisms would then damage zip disks put into them. Then those damaged disks could be damaged in such a way that they would cause another zip drive they were placed in to experience the same damage.
At least, that is my vague recollection of what I remember hearing at the time, which I can't remember the source of, so I can't vouch for its accuracy. It did seem like a decent explanation for serial failures though. Some people would insist that theirs never had a problem while others would complain about them failing over and over again and it is entirely possible that it is because, after they replaced it, they would try to get their files off their disks and then the problem would spread to the new drive.
My understanding is that they were supposed to have fixed it in later versions, but other posts on this article suggests that it was mitigated rather than outright fixed and that some units were simply less vulnerable than others.
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I have an original external Zip 100 SCSI which got a bit flaky in the end, but had seen very heavy use in the '90s, a Zip 250 ATA in a PowerMac "Snakebite" dual 450MHz G4 which works fine, and an external USB Zip drive (either 100 or 250, can't remember) that was my girlfriend's, who's now my wife, which also works fine. They really were revolutionary when it came to cost per megabyte and performance.
Mine still works too. (Score:2)
and towards the end I got one of the low-profile USB-powered drives.
Got of those, too (the early USB 1 ones, with the exposed ATAPI connector. I ended up buying Iomega's Firewire expansion that attaches on the back of the slim USB and latches on that ATAPI connector, as Firewire 400 had much better bandwidth than USB 1, provided enough power and thus required only a single cable, and I had a cheap Firewire 400 adapter laying around from some video project (funily: the Firewire 400 card was a free bundle bundled with some crappy movie software that was selling poorly and was
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The computer I connected by first Zip 100 drive to had an 80MB hard drive.
amazing for its time (Score:5, Informative)
It held the equivalent over 70 floppy disks, at the time of its introduction it was a huge leap forward and despite being proprietary it was such a popular format.
Originally SCSI and Parallel-port only (or internal), then it got onto USB.
Iomega also had the Jaz drives, which held 1GB. Hot swappable hard drives was a wild idea, the problem was it had a reputation for major reliability issues and high failures.
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I had a Macintosh LC II at the time, with a 80 Mb harddrive. I bought a Zip drive for it and suddenly I could a. back up all my data onto a single disk, and b. massively increase available storage, for a price that was a lot lower than buying an external SCSI harddrive. It was amazing.
The SCSI interface made a big difference: mine was a lot faster than the parallel interface ZIP drives I encountered.
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Before iomega's Zip there were the Bernoulli and SyQuest drives.
Bernoulli drives inflated under spin and the head made an air cushion to push that inflated package away from it to avoid crashes. If the disc spun down, then the media moved away from the head. I have no experience with these so I don't know how well this worked in practice.
SyQuest was just a removable HDD platter. It had pretty poor read and write times because the head couldn't be as close to the disc as in a real HDD. They were however very
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When I was hired for my first sysadmin job I was shocked to find that the former admin was using either 20MB or 50MB Bernoulli cartridges (I don't remember which size exactly) as a backup solution for the Netware server. Those Bernoulli cartridges were very expensive. I quickly installed a tape backup solution so I could maintain three backups on-site and off-site.
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Funnily enough, (somewhat later than your story) I recall my teammates and I spending literally months convincing our still-in-love-with-tapes boss that instead of expanding our tape library, we could get better utility and save money by deploying a couple backup servers (one onsite, one elsewhere) with nice big RAIDs.
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I don't recall the Jazz being hot swappable, maybe that was the source of the reliability problem if it really wasn't.
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The drives have a button on the front you would press and the mechanism in the drive would eject the cartridge.
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To be fair, I was a new sysad, and had not been trained on filesystems - this was before the UNIX System Administrator's Handbook was published - or much of anything about the system, really, so I kinda learned most of what I know the hard way.
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Needing to unmount was a property shared with other operating systems, but early Unixlikes used to have silly problems. For SCO Xenix I was advised (by a SCO employee) to shut down using the following formula:
sync
sync
haltsys
The second sync didn't do anything the first sync didn't, it was because on that platform sync returned immediately instead of blocking until the unwritten blocks had all been written, and it was there to slow you down. You didn't want to halt too soon...
I was used to doing something bef
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I was used to doing something before shutting down on DOS though, because my first PCs had ST-506 interface disks and those usually didn't park themselves. You had to send them a command to ask them to do it,
I have a vague memory of needing to do something similar with an old HP size-of-a-portable-dishwasher disk drive from my very first job. Couldn't tell you what it was, though.
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There were also internal IDE ZIP drives. I still have about a dozen of the 100MB and 250MB internal IDE drives laying around. I also have two Pentium class computers with ZIP drives installed and working just in case someone would happen to need data from an old ZIP cartridge. Back in the day the click of death forced me to always make two backups of ZIP cartridges just in case, because the click of death seemed inevitable. In one of my boxes of crap (er, uh, vintage parts) I believe I have an external 750M
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I still have Jaz drives. Or Jiz Drives, as they are now known thanks to GTA2.
I think it's the USB to SCSI adapter I have, but the performance is really bad. I need to boot up an old XP machine and try it, ideally with a proper SCSI card. I've got a PCI one, but what I really need is a PCMCIA one.
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It was remarkable because we had two different media that were not working for us.
You had floppy disks, where their 1440 kiB/1.44MB (yes, they mixed both IEC and SI units in one format) capacity was limiting. You also had CD-ROMs, which was a great way to mass-distribute large amounts of data, but only in a read only format. hard drives ranged from a couple hundred megabytes to a few gigabytes.
If you needed to move data, the lucky ones had networks, else you had to pack them on multiple floppies. And softwa
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Floppies didn't die, they transformed - SD Cards (Score:2)
amazing for its time
Floppies didn't die, they transformed. Zip was not the end. Today we have SD Cards, and they are standard equipment on some systems.
:-)
And of course many would could consider USB flash drives part of that transformation. However I like to think of SD Cards first given the similar looks.
It really only had a short window (Score:2)
I remember having exactly one use for my ZIP drive, to get some files from my PC to a PC with a CD writer. I did that exactly once.
Retrospectively it seemed like such a short time solution. It was rare, so you couldn't exchange discs, and after a few years there was the Internet, a fast and simple communications medium where you could just operate an FTP-Server at home and move files that way.
Siemens used them in their phone switch systems (Score:3)
They looked really cool (Score:4, Interesting)
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I had a weird Zenith laptop at one time that used those minidiscs. They were very expensive and hard to find.
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Minidisc is a true Magneto-Optical drive and is very very cool technology, but unfortunately Sony really strangled the shit out of it in the name of copyright enforcement. There were a couple of models of PC interface, but you couldn't do audio with them. The audio devices didn't allow doing high speed copies, and would respect the copyright bit. If you were a nerd you could get the decoder and encoder chips and just not connect that pin (srsly) and strip out protection but you couldn't just buy a device li
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The rebranded ones were the best: https://i0.wp.com/applerescueo... [wp.com]
I think Fujifilm had them as well. Always white.
There was also the LS120 (Score:4, Informative)
I have a couple of these drives gathering dust on the top shelf of my play room. They fitted a standard floppy drive slot but connected to the PATA socket on the motherboard. I just looked on the label of one of them which has a manufacturing date of march 1999.
These were a great idea. They were compatible with standard 1.44MB floppy discs so didn't take up an extra slot in the PC case but could also use the special discs which could store 120MB.
Unfortunately, after using them for a short while, I started to find errors when reading back to check and verify backup archive files. The drives themselves didn't fail when I was using them but the media proved to be pretty much as unreliable as the late manufactured cheap and very nasty standard floppy discs.
Soon afterwards, reliable USB flash drives were becoming cheaper in ever increasing capacities so I donated an unopened, factory shrink wrapped box of LS120 discs to the local Museum of Computing. So that was the end of the super floppy.
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PATA socket? Shurely you mean IDE?
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PATA socket? Shurely you mean IDE?
Yes, thank you, it was a while ago!
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Yeah I "bet" on LS-120 kinda.
Though the bet at the time was on a Mac (I recommended it to someone over a Zip drive). I thought they would take off more. I don't think the drive ever got used for anything other than floppies, but floppies stuck around for way past their time anyway so it wasn't a complete waste!
It wasn't a genius move when the first iMacs shipped without floppy drives. They didn't have CD-RW drives, and USB memory keys didn't exist. There was basically no way to exchange data or back up anyt
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Indeed, LS120 was unreliable and therefore worthless except that you got a 2x or 4x speed floppy drive. If you had a lot of floppies to image, that was a nice feature. Only a few of the late models read floppies at 4x speed.
Looks like (Score:2)
Looks like XDA Developers just told AI to rewrite the Wikipedia article and posted it.
They were great when Zip drives came out (Score:2)
Parallel port ZIP drive was slow and inconvenient (Score:3)
The Zip Drive was really great in moving large files around.
I had a Parallel port ZIP drive and I remember it being quite slow.
It was alro really annoying if you daisy-chained your printer on to it.
The ZIP drive needed to be the first device in the chain, so it had the highest priority for data (as it was closer to the CPU).
This kind of hindered the portability of the drive, since then you had to unplug your printer, and you had to unplug the drive from the PC.
The Jaz drive was the real workhorse. I got exposure to that through my Dad's work, where it was possible to loan it for a day or so.
A few years later in 1998 I got an LS-120 "Super floppy" drive, that would read regular floppies, and the LS-120 disks that held the equivalent of 120 floppies. That drive was pretty good, but then USB sticks were just around the corner, followed by consumer grade CD Writer drives.
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You probably had a crappy parallel port. They weren't all equal. ZIP drives supported EPP parallel interfaces which could move the equivalent of a full floppy disk EVERY SECOND (1-2MB/s). This was insanely fast for the time. When the ZIP drive came out your choice was:
1. Spend minutes copying a single 1.44MB floppy.
2. Burn a CDRW at 2x speed (300KB/s) - fun fact in the early 2000s CD burners had still not caught up to parallel port ZIP drives in speed. Bonus they had not proper caching and there was still a
I had 3 Jaz drives (Score:2)
I paid for one of them to be repaired by a reputable firm. 300 GBP it cost, and did not fix anything.
Since I was using them to hold backups, and the trust was gone, that ended their career with me.
It was not very good (Score:2)
Not reliable and not durable. Initially, it worked great, but then it started to have trouble. I had the SCSI version. I eventually got an MOD drive as replacement that never caused any issues. But sadly consumers do not want reliable storage, so MOD was not developed further.
IMO, the Zip drive was just another badly made piece of technology that claimed to be something it was not. Quite like QIC-80, at least the consumer versions. Essentially just a money-grab.
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I had just about every kind of Zip 100 drive. The original dark purple external parallel and SCSI versions, the internal ATA and SCSI, translucent USB... They all get the same click of death problem eventually. I also had a SyQuest 135 (and the 44 before it, both in SCSI) and never had any problems with that. All the printers had both so they could take people's files, and I don't mean printer like a box on your counter, I mean like a "print house" but nobody in publishing calls them that.
Now you can stick
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Agreed. And I also have moved to SSDs in external cases and some quasi-SSD memory sticks (they have SMART). But I miss the "store and forget" thing I could do with MODs.
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It's funny because, in my home office right now, I still have a SyQuest EZ 135 drive sitting on a high shelf. Hadn't been touched for probably 25+ years until just now, when I pulled it down to remind myself what brand it was.
I had the parport version. Awesome. (Score:2)
My HDD on my laptop with VGA grayscale had 40MB, the Zip disk 100 MB. It was basically a permanent extension of my early 90 DOS setup. I could even run it off my Highscreen Handheld pocket PC. The cable was pretty thick, but you could do it. Awesome. It never failed me and I eventually decommissioned it and moved all my zip disks to one CD. 8-)
My memory of Zip Drives: (Score:2)
*clickclickclick* Fuck ...
Remembering Zip Drives (Score:3)
Yeah... let's not.
I'm old enough to have zero fondness for old computer shit. Vintage is for those who haven't had to suffer it to do actual work.
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I'm old enough to have zero fondness for old computer shit. Vintage is for those who haven't had to suffer it to do actual work.
I mostly agree, but I also remember (this was back in the 1980s) a feeling of being inducted into a special fraternity and learning its arcane secrets.
I used them (Score:2)
The other even bigger issue (Score:2)
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They came out here first, at a time when they were still useful. CDRWs were very expensive and/or slow. Most of the old ones were SCSI, and most people didn't have a SCSI interface in their PC. As I was a nerd with a Unix and Unixlike background I did, and my employer kicked down a Philips CDD521 with the 2x upgrade that they had been using to write masters and had only recently obsoleted with a 4x Plextor. This is sometimes said to have been the first CD writer, but I think I read somewhere that there was
Contemporary writeable CD were vastly better. (Score:2)
Uncle Sugar bought the Zip drives I used at work where I learnt to dislike their meh relaiblity.
For myself I didn't bother with them since I found their high failure rate and media price annoying. I bought a parallel port HP CD burner instead whose drive lasted me many years. (I always burn CD/DVD at slowest speed available for best burn, proven while distrohopping and various live DOS and BartPE discs. Fre trial CDRWIN etc were limited to 1x which was ideal.)
The Zip and early writeable CD eras largely ove
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I'm American and I've never heard of sugar uncles before. Sounds like the kind of thing you would keep secret.
Almost a standard then shot themselves in the foot (Score:3)
I was really angry with IOMega, my IDE drive failed and I demanded a replacement. I did so through two channels: online and by phone. Result? I got two new drives and ultimately just one survived. My .5% was actually 66%?
Many clients were giving me material on 100MB disks, it was a de facto standard. I was liberated by ancient 3.5" floppys and my "slow" 56k was not such a bottleneck after all.
Then IOMega launched Jaz, pocketZip and then 250MB Zip.
They fragmented themselves... CDs easily took over although more fussy (e.g. they were never truly RW)
I still have a drawful of ZIP drives with God knows what still saved there :-(
Still have four Zip drives (Score:2)
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You should have played the lottery. I don't know of anyone that didn't have nightmares about the "click..click..click". Every single time I inserted a ZIP cartridge I held my breath.
Ah the 25 pin parellel port (Score:3, Informative)
At one point I remember having a flatbet scanner, 100MB zip drive, and Canon Bubblejet printer daisy chained off a single parallel port on my 166MHz Pentium 2 with 16 MB of ram running windows 95.
Printing a file off a zip drive directly didn't work so well.
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Most computers didn't have scsi at the time. This was before USB so Parallel port it was. And on those days most people had parallel port printers. So you plugged the printer into the zip drive. I can't remember what the limitations where. I'm sure you couldn't print at the same time as accessing the drive. Linux even supported it.
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I'd forgotten about Bubblejet printers - a great option before Laserjet printers became so cheap.
I still fondly remember the old high speed line printers that existed before dot matrix and daisy wheel ones. They were extremely fast - some of them used a vacuum to help suck the paper out and stack it since it was spewing out so fast.
There was always something satisfying about having a printout of your program on a fanfold stack of wide 132 col paper. You could put plastic covers on it to make it like a book
Some AI-inspired poetry about Zip drives... (Score:2, Funny)
The storage, the clicking, the plot.
I see no reason why the Click of Death treason
Should ever be forgot.
Iomega had 100 megs, a kingdom of space,
To save every file with speed and with grace.
No floppy could match it, no disk could compete,
It made our old desktops feel shiny and sleek.
But deep in the plastic, a shadow was found,
A rhythmic, sharp snapping—a terrible sound.
The "Click of Death" started, the heads went astray
, And all of our data just withered
Iomega: Too little, too late (Score:2)
The data-CD and audio card became standard PC accessories around 1995: 1 CD held 540MB of data. The much smaller-capacity ZIP drive, reaching the market after this, had the singular advantage of write access.
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My understanding was the MiniDisc held less bits than a CD, but it had a longer runtime due to the audio being compressed.
It seemed to be used mostly as a replacement for miniature tape recorders for dictation, home recordings, etc. I do recall hearing about some official music releases, but the compression would have made the sound quality inferior to CD.
Cooler were their Bernoulli drives (Score:2)
The Iomega Bernoulli drives were large floppy disks in a hard casing, those we had stored 150 MB back in the late '80s/early '90s.
The cool part is the drive head used the Bernoulli effect to "fly" over the flexible floppy surface to maintain proper read distance.
We used them to transfer animation frames between Amigas and the Mac fronted VideoCube system.
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I had a Bernoulli drive. It worked until it didn't. I replaced it with a Zip drive and that worked as long as I had it. There was another built into a G4 Mac tower I bought used. It was working the last time I tried it. I still have some disks, I should see if they still work.
It's also rumored that a SCSI Zip disk will work on an Apple IIGS if you have a SCSI card.
New fangled tech (Score:3)
Anyone remember the "stringy floppy" (continuous tape loop)?
I remember first hearing about them in form of the Microdrive used with the Sinclair QL, but they'd already existed for a number of years before that.
Sinclair's stuff was always so cheap, cheesy and unreliable. If you saw the Sinclair C5 (first commercial EV?!) it's give you a good intuition about everything else Sinclair built, although his calculators were OK, as was the Spectrum. The ZX-80 was so poorly designed that one recommended solution to it overheating was to sit a carton of cold milk on top of it!
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My father had a friend with a TRS-80 Model I that had a stringy floppy. I asked my dad to get one until he told me how much they cost. Another year of cassette tapes until we finally purchased some external 5.25" diskette drives. 160KB per diskette! WooHoo!
Portable Emulators! (Score:3)
Back then most emulators were just an executable and a couple smaller files. Throw a full library of games on a ZIP disk, head to your friend's house to play games.
I'm surprised by the 0.5% failure number (Score:3)
I'm pretty sure my own experience was a lot higher percentage than that.
It was a nice idea, but in the end the medium was simply not reliable enough. CDs couldn't replace them quickly enough.
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Oh yeah, in my experience I would say at least a 20% to 25% failure rate.
zip.com (Score:3)
Have Zip 250 cartridges now (Score:2)
2.88 MB, not 1.44MB (Score:2)
> Back in the 1990s, floppy disks "had a mere capacity of 1.44MB,"
Not quite true. 5.25" floppies had progressed from single to double to quad density (1.2 MB), then being replaced by 3.5" "floppies" (rigid case, so not really floppy anymore, at least not on the outside) which initially had 1,44MB capacity, but then doubled to 2.88MB although admittedly these were not so widely used.
Before my time, but I believe the original 8" floppies, used in the early 70's, also went up to 1.2MB capacity.
Used them for work and personal backups (Score:2)
Fantastic storage for the time, never had one go bad.
Remembering Zip Drives - no thanks (Score:2)
Syquest (Score:3)
I had a Syquest 88 (1st gen was 40MB) and an Adaptec 1542b SCSI card.. My 286 had a 30MB MFM drive internally, so it was a big addition. I was learning Minix and leaving my main drive untouched was great. I had 2-3 disks to use. Since it was SCSI, I could also use it with Macintosh w/ a DOS format software.
When I bought a 486, I wanted 386BSD or Linux. A university nearby had Macintoshes w/ internet access. I was able to FTP Linux, etc unto that Syquest instead of transfering to a stack of floppies. I later got a 4mm DAT. I had tar programs DOS, Macintosh, OS/2 and of course Unix that could read/write tapes.
CDs were just starting to appear, but I didn't have one. My 1st sysadmin job had 1 CD drive for Sun systems, another for HP and another for SGI. 70 machines & 3 drives. It was 5 years later that work bought a CD-R for $1000 instead of sending software on tape.
Wait? These are obsolete? (Score:2)
Zip 100 to double storage (Score:3)
I purchased a zip 100 (parallel port) to double my Packard Bell 486 SX 100 mb hard drive. It was magical right up until I powered it on. Back then I didn't understand much about speed restrictions due to connection types, etc. I even tried running Photoshop and probably Macromedia Flash directly from it.
Kids today don't realize the struggle was real :D
Yea we used them (Score:2)
We used ZIP drives in a post production facility doing computer animation and early non-linear editing. I think I had a SCSI ZIP drive on one of my Commodore Amigas at home and used them for a while They are essentially a hard drive in a cartridge, so of course the failure rate is going to be higher than a fixed, sealed disc. They very capably filled a brief niche before thumb drives and easily removable eSATA and USB connections etc become popular. Before that it was kind of a pain to move and re-mo
We kept our CAD drawings on them...for a while. (Score:3)
At a large US auto manufacturer our crew were responsible for commissioning controls systems and maintaining the drawings related thereto.
The HDDs on the CAD machines were simply NOT big enough to contain all the drawings so we had stacks of ZIP disks and both mobile (SCSI by parallel port) and internal (SCSI) readers for them.
One of the more experienced guys bought a CD burner (that was a $600.00 purchase at the time) and would make weekly backups for us. Blank CDs were $10.00 apiece at the time.
A couple of years into it we started hearing the "click of death". Thank you Butch; you saved our work!
Sneakernet warez (Score:2)
In the 1990s there was only one person in my circle of friends who could get a broadband connection. He would download from the warez scene ftp servers and the rest of us went to his house to load up Zip disks of the latest releases. But once CD burners became affordable we all switched to those and our Zip drives were forgotten, tossed in a box of old hardware that eventually went to the great recycling center in the sky.
Some day ... (Score:2)
Except for the poor person who jumps in and says, "We still use it. Millions of dollars in sunk costs for data and applications that can't be transfered elsewhere."
Handy for vintage PC file transfers (Score:2)
Never had the pleasure (Score:2)
I only threw mine out last year (Score:3)
I actually just tossed my Jazz drive and the disks about a year ago. I was hoping someone might want them, like a computer museum or collector, but I couldn't find anyone to take them.
Back in the 1990s, I worked with large (for the time) data sets, and I used to take work home. Internet connectivity was slow at the time, and security prevented much of the data from being internet accessible anyway. I don't remember the exact numbers, but at a time when 2GB hard drives were something like $900, a Jaz drive itself was $1200, with the 1GB disks being about $100 and 2GB being about $225. If you only had one disk, it made no sense, but if you had two or more, it was much more economical to have a Jaz.
I got one at home, and I convinced the company I had to get one. It was a godsend. I could completely backup my work drive onto a Jaz, take it home, and work from there. I never worked with Zip disks, although others did, and the reliability problems were legendary. But I don't recall ever have any reliability issues with my Jaz systems. Of course, the Jaz was a SCSI system, which was a little more reliable than many of the other controllers in use at the time (IDE, MFM, RLL, etc.).
Of course, once rewritable CDs became available, the Jaz's days were numbered. CDs were much slower, and only half the size, but they were $20 for 650MB (and the price dropped significantly, down to a buck or two), compared to $100 for 1TB. And unlike the Jaz, every PC and Mac had a CD reader, it not a writer. The Jaz simply couldn't be financially justified.
Before I scuttled my drives, I made sure I had backups of all the data. The contents of those six Jaz cartridges would fit on a single 8GB USB thumbdrive that's under $5 today.
I used them (Score:2)
LS-120 Zip (Score:2)
120MB, faster read/write, and backward compatible with standard 1.44MB 3.5" floppies. I still have 1 or 2 of these in the plastic somewhere, and 10+ sealed disks.
Re:The 90s are not ancient history! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the tech industry. The talking about the 90s may as well be about archaeologists digging in Pompeii. The tech landscape was literally nothing at all like what it is today. We have different tech, providing different benefits, doing different things, used in fundamentally different ways. It is absolutely ancient history and storage in the 90s is about as different to today as storage in the 50s from punch cards differs to today.
There is literally zero in common in storage now to then. Now if you'll excuse me I need to make sure my files have cloud sync'd from the internet properly before my flight (something which didn't even exist as a storage concept back in the 90s, let alone something millions of people do)
Re: (Score:3)
Agreed. For example, people today don't know what a "file" is, Oldtimer!
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. For example, people today don't know what a "file" is, Oldtimer!
Or why cut and paste is called cut and paste. Then there is the difference between CF and LF...
Re: (Score:2)
Most people know what files are, but the idea of a file system isn't one that they grasp. Phones have made this a lot worse as they tend to hide the notion of directories from
Re: The 90s are not ancient history! (Score:2)
Every child who ever went elementary school knows what cutting and pasting is, you sundowning boomer.
Re: (Score:2)
Not at all true. We had hard drives in the 80's and those continue to be used today, even if supplemented with SSDs.
Of course they were much smaller capacity - I remember having a 10MB (yes - meg, not gig, or tera) "winchester" hard drive when working at Acorn in the early 80's.
Certainly cloud storage wasn't a thing back then, although it wouldn't have been such an alien concept. In the pre-internet BBS days the servers were mostly for file sharing, not for personal use, but already with the early internet
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In the very early 90s I did some contract work for Eveready Battery. They were using 56K leased lines to connect to the corporate server (in Cleveland I believe) for off-site files and storage. Man that had to be expensive at the time.
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You're confusing the medium and the use of it. Yeah the concept of a drive used back then exists today (even if the tech is different) but the way we use it has also changed dramatically. People don't even understand what C:\ refers to these days anymore, that's gone away with the creation of virtual folders like "Documents" and "Pictures". So with the HDD we have very different tech, which works at a fundamentally different principle, and stores files in a different way people used to.
But that is all irrel
Re: (Score:2)
Punched cards are an interesting comparison to today's tech - they did serve as a storage medium, but were also the way you input programs back before online access to shared computer systems or personal computers were a thing.
Closely related to punched cards, at least in terms of "storage technology" (holes in a media, detected by photo diodes) was punched tape, either paper or mylar (or longevity). This was now more of a storage media, as well as a way that you would buy software before cassette tapes and
Re: (Score:2)
The tech you use today evolved from earlier tech and ideas.
We had computers that ran at 1.2 MHz. Today's run millions of times faster.
We had storage (floppy, tape, ZIP, HDD, CD/DVD, EEPROM) before today's SSD was born.
And, as someone else noted, we were at the birth of the internet. Before that, we had acoustic couplers and then direct connect modems to communicate with file servers.
Many of us even remember when AOL came on a floppy disk before the CD coasters started arriving in the mailbox twice a week
Re: (Score:2)
Of course it did. Never claimed otherwise. Much of what we do in most of our lives is related to ancient history. That doesn't make it any less ancient history.
Re: (Score:2)
There is literally zero in common in storage now to then.
We are still using (re-)writeable 120mm shinny plastic disks for back up of certain things, long term storage, and as media interchange. ;-) ;-P
We are still using Winchester type disks to store bulk data, but mostly in NAS boxen nowadays (I have one 5mts from me as I write this), akin to Novell Netware or WindowsNT NOS Boxes.
We have that in common with the 90s.
Re: (Score:2)
Disagree.
a) very VERY few people use re-writable 120mm shinny plastic discs for any storage. It's not actually a common feature in a computer these days with the companies producing those re-writable discs throwing in the towel. Additionally those *killed* the ZIP drive, so you're talking about a tech we not only borderline don't use anymore, but one which came after the ancient history we are describing with the ZIP drive.
b) Winchester type disks are no longer standard for PCs, but even if they were they a
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not even 50 and I used zip drives. How old is the person that posted this?
Mate, I'm not even 50 either (zip drives passed me by personally, but not quite a few people I know. It was very much situation dependent), but they are ancient history.
They were fading tech by 2000, because CD-Rs and CW writers became cheap by then and had the advantage that they could be read anywhere. People too young to remember ever seeing them in the wild are now mid career.
You got old. We both did. It sucks but that's life.