BGR flashback: Iomega ZIP drive!
Ill admit it; we’ve been slacking on the BGR flashback series. But to pick things up again, this weeks BGR flashback is the Iomega zip drive. Come on, you so know you had about 100 of these things in your home and office! Released in 1994, but made extremely popular a little while later, the zip drive used a 100MB removable disk. The drives actually jumped up to 250MB, but that required a new reader. The new 250MB reader was backwards-compatible with the 100MB disks, though, otherwise all hell would have broken loose. Iomega later introduced the Jaz drive which used 1GB and 2GB disks, but it was never the same after that. CD-Rs and CD-RWs were quickly made famous for a bunch of reasons, and out went the zip drive. How many of you used to use the zip drives? What did you say? It’s a has-been? It’s a classic damn it!
They actually make a 750meg Zip drive as well. They were great and not as fragile as CDRs.
yeah and you still find these in studios, Zip drives for MPC drum machines. Those jaz drives sucked, if you droped a disk then it was over and you lost all your data. Man do those disk take a long time to load. I still have mine full of great sounds
I had one for photography, but now I use a pullable rack drive with a key.
The rack is cool for critical backup and Ghosting.
Everyone should have one.
They were great and all, until your disks started suffering from THE CLICK OF DEATH!!!
I was a college student for graphic/multimedia design when I had one of those.
Man, I hated them. They made my backpack so bulky!
After a couple of years of carrying Zip disks in school, I got a small 20GB external harddrive.
“The drives actually jumped up to 250GB, but that required a new reader. The new 250GB reader was backwards-compatible with the 100MB disks”.
From 100MB to a quarter of a terabyte, that’s a big jump
Umm… for a boy genius, you’re a little off. They didn’t jump to 250GB, they jumped to 250MB and then jumped again with another new reader to 750MB before ultimately becoming ignored by the public at large. They are still sold, however, at iomega.com
What are these “CD-Rs and CD-RWs” of which you speak? Do you mean I shouldn’t be using my Zip Drive any more? It has faithfully served me for more than a decade.
In all seriousness, I do still have one. It does still run. I do have old files still backed up on it.
@George
Yeah I wonder if BGR knows something we don’t. Some super secret unlocked potential.
I still have my Zipdrive and disks laying around somewhere. How else was I supposed to get all my illegally downloaded tunes from my school account to my non-networked personal PC? I believe mine is the opaque light blue version which was USB. I’m pretty sure it was not plug and play of course, but USB nonetheless…
I had one of these badboys, never really used it much. I think I still have it somewhere actually….
I still have the drive, but all my disks died from the click of death…anyone know where I can get some more disks?
Anyone else remember the “Click of Death”? I too have several of these sitting at home. Even some green and yellow disks too!
LOL, the computer I’m on at school right now (a brand new 24″ aluminum iMac, by the way) has a 250MB Zip drive attached. Oh, college. *sigh*
Those things were so unreliable, here’s a nice little story about my experience with zip drives.
When I was in college I worked part time in a computer lab, we received all new computers with zip drives. This was in 2001 when CD Burners were becoming the standard. (yes school IT people are stupid, that’s why they’re working for the government)
Anyway, time and time again students would use the zip drives to save their school work only to have the drives eat their disks over and over again. They would come up complaining and there was nothing we could do, it got so bad that eventually they put out of order signs on all the zip drives.
Those were the days….
I recently found a few zip disks and had to ask everyone I knew until I found someone who had a reader so I could get stuff off of them. it was a bunch of old graphics stuff I did when I first started working with photoshop, so it was a great find.
had a zip plus drive….worked on mac and pc. Remember the ensuing LS-120 drive wars too
zip drive pfft
I was still using floppy disks ;D
Actually i had zip disks that i used for carrying college projects on, but I never bothered buying the drive.
i remember these beats… lol
we had to use them for our animation class for 3d studio max… they were freaking expensive… lol.. good ol’ times…
cheers
Good times good times. Man i remember having a 100MB one of these it came with my first computer IDK if i ever used it though. Brings back memories from the late nineties.
Haha. I took apart my desktop to put a WIFI PCI card in it. I unhooked the ZIP drive and didn’t hook it back up. I realized I hadn’t used that thing in probably over 5 years. It was so dumb because it used the parallel port. Ha ha!
We used those things a bunch to hand in all our programs and code in college. They were the only thing we could find to store all the Visual Basic and C++ crap. Only problem was they tended to be picky on ejecting them, and in some cases, never came out. Ahh memories
I remember the “CLICK OF DEATH!”
Two things killed Iomega, the click of death which seemed to get worst as time went on and the capacity verses price issue. CDs were so cheap that I could burn a disk and throw it away cheaper than a zip disc that nobody would read outside my studio. The more versions they made, the harder it was for compatibility. 100MBs to 250 to 750 then came the Jaz drive which was already too little too late. CDs were already everywhere.
I am just surprised that the floppy is still required for some tasks… RAID anyone?
M
Zips are old But I have data on old Syquest 44MB carts and 230mb Bernoulli’s
Believe it or not my computer still has a Zip 100 (awww, damnit I thought it was at least 250…frick) and a floppy drive because it was either have holes in the front or old technology…so I left them in. They even work.