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.
Higher capacity Zip disks must be used in a drive with at least the same capacity ability. Generally, higher capacity drives also handle all lower capacity media. The 750 MB drive, however, cannot write to the 100 MB media, which is the cheapest and most common.
Zip media is similar in vertical size (but thicker) than 3.5" floppy disks, which means the drive slot is large enough to accept such a floppy. To prevent drive and disk damage, the underside of Zip media cases include a retroreflective spot in one corner. The drive mechanism will not engage if the reflective spot is not detected.
Unlike other diskette formats, the Zip's write protection is implemented on the software level.
The Zip system also introduced media access protection via a password. Like write protection, this was also implemented on the software level. One side effect of this implementation was that, on some drive models, it was possible to trick the software into allowing access to a different disk than it had believed was in the drive, thereby bypassing the password protection.
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 Maxell.
Iomega also produced an early line of external recordable CD drives using the Zip brand in the late 1990s, called the ZipCD 650. It used regular CD-R media and had no format relation to the magnetic Zip drive.
See also: Jaz drive, Iomega REV and Bernoulli drive.