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Zip drive

The Zip drive was a removable disk storage system, introduced by the Iomega company in late 1994. Later, it was also licensed to Epson of Japan.

The Zip system was based loosely on Iomega's earlier Bernoulli Box system; in both systems, a set of read/write heads mounted on a linear actuator flies over a rapidly spinning floppy disk mounted in a sturdy cartridge. The Zip disk used smaller media (about the size of a 3.5" microfloppy, rather than the compact disc-sized Bernoulli media), and a simplified drive design that reduced its cost. This resulted in a disk that had all of the 3.5" floppy's convenience, but held much more data, and had performance that was much quicker than a standard floppy drive (though not directly competitive with hard drives). The original Zip drive had a data transfer rate of about 1 megabyte/second and a seek time of 28 milliseconds on average, compared to a standard 1.4 MiB floppy's 500 Kbit/s transfer rate and several-hundred millisecond average seek time.

The Zip system was introduced with a capacity of 100 megabytes, and quickly became a success as people used them to hold large files (especially bitmap files and other desktop publishing-related items) that regular floppy disks would not be able to handle. As time went on, Iomega eventually increased the capacity to 250 and later 750 megabytes, while improving the data transfer rate and seek times.

Unlike other diskette formats, the Zip's write protection is implemented on the software level.

The Zip's popularity started to fade around 2000. By this time, numerous people had reliability problems with their Zip drives (especially the click of death), and the relatively high cost per megabyte of the proprietary cartridges was becoming unattractive, compared to the falling costs of CD-R and DVD±RW technology.

The Zip disks' suppliers include: Iomega, Fujifilm, Verbatim and Jaz drive, Iomega REV and Bernoulli drive.