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!
Dude!
That takes me back.
To about last month at my mom and dad’s house. My dad prepares and stores some of my old church’s docs and he STILL uses this drive (USB 1.1). My dad’s is the somewhat ice blue drive (to match the old iMac).
I bet these are super secure now. Kids in my current church youth group would have no idea what these are! I had a good laugh when I saw this!
Everyone should visit there parents and see what old electronics are still around the house. LOL!
I still have my ZIP250 (the slim one). Not too long ago I was going through the stuff in my garage and found the original ZIP100 serial version with a pass through connector… A tear dropped on the pavement… I listed it on freecycle.org and it was gone within one day. I hope it lives on at someone’s place. Now my ZIP250…that’s another story. Latest technology with SCSI and USB 1.1 interface, uses an external power supply. WOW… It still has the protective film on it as it was only used about 10 times.
Oh, yeah, I sure do remember the Zip, as well as the Jaz drives. Heck, I worked at the firm that designed ‘em. Despite the “click of death” problem, which, yeah, was a huge problem (i swear it wasn’t our fault!) I loved them. I still have a ton of those things laying around. More Jaz disks than Zip disks, but still… They were awesome, I was one of the multimedia guys and I had a drive at home and a drive at work and would cart back and forth a shovel-load of disks every day. Today I still use them when I borrow my son’s old Roland sp-808 GrooveSampler, which utilizes the Zip disk.
These are discontinued? no wonder my local pc shops don’t have them in stock.
I still have my relics. LOL 250mb drive and my 1GB drive. Gonna keep it and form a museum. I wish I could find my old commodore vic20 and 64. we used a tape drive back then. talk about slow. I guess i shouldn’t complain about how unreliable the 1GB iomega drive was connecting with Win98. What a nightmare……. not to mention how slow it was to transfer the data.
i remember the click of death. i would just keep reinserting the disk until i could read it….. then my patience would run out and i would try again the next day. also, the drives used the parallel port which meant it was sharing with my printer. what a joke that was.
I still use mine for audio producing purposes. One is for my Akai Mpc 3000, one is for my Ensoniq ASR-10 and I also have a Jaz drive. My cousin wants me to find a zip drive for him on Ebay now.
Good times.. Good times.. had all my warez on my zip disks
I still have my Zip 100 too, plus a Jazz drive with many discs of old files. They’re in a box in my closet and I go back and forth should I dump or save them since I don’t have any SCSI interfaces on my computers, just USB. At least I finally dumped my Amiga 3000!
Hell yeah I remember buying one of these and a new 33.6 modem. I was the shit on BBS’s back in the day.
And sadly, I remember the clicking of death. I lost many a porn file to that sound.
Whatever happened to Iomega and their 5,000,000 Terabyte optical drives they were supposed to have by now?
This certainly takes me back and makes me feel old in the same breath. I remember buying the external parallel port version and feeling like I ruled the world. No one else on campus had one and I was even given special permission to load driver on one machine. I was the big man on campus. Of course, after that, it seemed everyone had one. I even got my grandfather hooked on it. I eventually upgraded to the internal ATAPI variant, of course, and would buy the 100 MB (never went more than that) disks in packs. I even remember the very first time I formatted one with NTFS. Geez … I really do feel old now. Thanks BG! =-)
I used them a lot but they kept refusing to eject. What a pain. I recently ran across one in the garage, but Leopard would not recognize it.
You just knew they would be obsolete one day, and they are.
I think I still have a drive laying around too, I think it’s the Parallel Port version (since I guess I didn’t have USB on my computer at the time LOL!).
At the college I went to, they had zip drives in all the computers. It was pretty handy in its day.
Yeah man, I put a Zip in every PC I built for several years (I generally build myself a new PC every year). They were okay, and I still have some disks lying around even though I’ve long since retired the PC’s that had the drives.
And yeah, I was one of the suckers that bought into the Jaz. I could kick myself in the head when I think back to how much money I invested in that technology. Then again, I had dual 8″ and 5.25″ Bernoulli’s, and I had IEEE-488 interfaced 1MB floppy drives for my Commodore 64, so it’s not the first time I’ve bought bought into some new-fangled storage technology at a ridiculously high price!
I still have a parallel-port ZIP-100 somewhere, and some disks – but really, I knew that those disks would become obsolete even back in 2001, when I bought my first USB memory stick. Yes, everybody laughed at me, 16MB for an insane amount of money… but in the end, those USB sticks have replaced most other forms of offline data transfer.
I had external and internal zip drives, but one day, my internal drive died. I sent it in to Iomega for servicing and they gave me back a different drive that unfortunately suffered from the click of death syndrome. That replacement drive proceeded to infect all of my zip disks so they would do the click of death even in healthy zip drives. All my data on the disks was lost and the disks and drives became useless. Up until that point I loved my zip drives. Afterwards, not so much.
I used to smuggle mine into work, plug it into the ONE computer that had a fatpipe connection (now long gone defunct airline) and download from the original Napster. I am sure it is still laying around somewhere in my hardware buckets out in the garage. That was about the same time Ram hit a buck a meg and hard drives were growing towards 50 gigs. Dial up! Mullets!mice with balls! CRT’s ah the good old days
I had one of those and used it for backing up my MS Money, then it died and I bought a USB version which I still use today. It was cheap and I have like 20 ZIP discs, so I’ll continue using it until it dies.
I had like four of these. They were great and a lot of companies offered them as add on options. I later moved to the ill-fated LS 120 Superdrive too. I bet I still have one somewhere. I know it would fire right up as these things are bomb-proof!
The click of death. Ah, yes. Good times.
This site came up when I googled to try to find a way to get access to my files that are prisoner on those 100mb Zip Disks! Evidently Iomega doesn’t have a driver that I can load on to XP so that I can access the info on those disks. I do some writing and actually have a couple of bodies of work on those disks! Anybody have any suggestions?? ((preferably not the smart-ass kind! I’ve kicked own ass pretty good already!!))
THANKS
I have a zip 250. But it’s broken and who can fixed it? I’ve a lot of storage on my zips, but iomega doens’t make it. I’ve lose my money and de quality of op zipdrive. I’ll never will buy anything from Iomega in the future. They may at last the policy to fixed their own products.
I’ve a zip 250 Mb. In Belgium and other countries the disks are still available. But where can I find a new zip drive 250? Iomega give me no answer.
Thanks
Go to the Iomega sight they have drivers for XP.
Go to Ebay.