Discussion

Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

bananaflag: There was also the issue that one would also need a reader. Why would I buy a zip reader if no one else has one (network effect)? (Btw I never saw in my life a zip reader or a zip disk.)Whereas with USB sticks all one needed was a USB port. I immediately wanted a stick.

ben_w: Before the first iMac arrived with only USB ports and thereby forced peripheral makers to support USB, USB just wasn't all that common even in the Windows world: why would a 1997 manufacturer bother with USB when all the machines already had all the other ports we here in 2026 find subsumed into USB?But only a few years later, as you say, USB thumb drives were making Zip drives irrelevant.

iamtedd: In all these nostalgic retrospectives, I never read how the zip drive can achieve 100x or more capacity than the floppy. What is the engineering feat that allowed this? There's one paragraph in Wikipedia that says the heads fly across the disk like a hard drive. OK, how did they manage that while the disk isn't sealed? Is that all it took?Similarly, articles just gloss right over the "click of death" without any technical explanation of what goes wrong. Why were these drives and/or media so prone to failure?There's nothing new in this article.

aggakake: IIRC there's some kind of optical tracking going on.

masklinn: > I never read how the zip drive can achieve 100x or more capacity than the floppy. What is the engineering feat that allowed this?Improvement in production processes and materials (e.g. magnetic coatings) allowing smaller tracks and smaller more precisely positioned heads. The 3 1/2 floppy dates back to 1983, the high-density 1.44MB to 1986, the Zip drive was released in 1994. A “super high density” 20 MB floppy has already been attempted in 1990.And around the same time as the Zip was the LS-120, which has the exact same dimensions as a 3.5” floppy (and could read those), so it was not really exceptional.Also it was expensive, part of that was the lower scale and lack of competition but the increased production requirements were also a factor, Zip drives and media had tighter tolerances.The click of death was because when the head got misaligned the drive would return it to the home position, if part of the drive had failed the head would never realign so the drive would keep trying, producing a characteristic clicking sound. HDDs can develop the same, but it’s less common than it was on Zip drives. The tighter tolerance were most likely a factor, it was more likely for a zip to age out of tolerance and develop terminal misalignment.

inatreecrown2: I used a Zip drive with an Akai MPC 2000 over SCSI to store all my songs and sounds. Loved it! Never had a problem with it, and I didn't exactly look after it well. The MPC itself still had the builtin floppy drive, and the zip just blew the floppy away in speed and capacity.

konart: I'm sure this is the second time I even read about them.I don't even think I've seen a single on here in Russia in the 90s.5.25 in my fathers company? Sure. 3.5 everywhere else? Da. CDs at some point.Hell, even minidisc was there (also almost non-existent, I think I know only two people who actually owned a minidisc player).No sing of Zip.

acranox: Most of us were using Zip drives to backup our files and then put the disks on shelf. There was no cloud backup, and 100MB was often enough for all your personal files.

ndr42: Interesting that in that time all kind of external storage solutions emerged: I used Zip drives, the follow-up "Jaz drive" (1GB) and Syquest disks (270 MB?). The latter two chained together with thick SCSI cables to a PowerMac 7200.Edit: Today I use just 2.5" SSDs in the same way. There a small sata to usb-c adapter where I plug them in without any further enclosure.

inglor_cz: ZIP drives were too expensive for freshly post-Communist Czechia. A FDD would cost about USD 40-50, much more affordable than the ZIP drive with its 200 USD price tag. And the media were much cheaper, especially if you bought no-name diskettes for, say, USD 2-3. This way, you could discard a bad medium without feeling the economic pinch too much. Discarding a 20 USD ZIP medium would be quite painful.I think I only saw two computers with ZIP drives in the wild, so to say. Which created its own anti-network effects: if there is no expectation of the other party having a compatible drive, you will either have to do with floppies, or maybe carry an external HDD with you, but you won't use an exotic and expensive format. Pretty much the only plausible use was backup.I still believe that with a more aggressive price policy, ZIPs could have conquered a lot of territory in the 1990s. But 200/20 USD was just too much money to spend. Not just in the post-Soviet bloc, but almost everywhere in Asia, too. Big markets lost because of the cost, and therefore a chance to entrench the standard worldwide.

acdha: USB was slooooooow in comparison to SCSI or later FireWire, though, so that took a hardware generations to really catch on.I think the network effect was more a question of who had tons of data: for example, all of the graphic design shops had Zip or Jazz drives because they needed to schlep client deliverables around so you could just assume they had the hardware. Most people weren’t generating that much data before digital cameras became common.

wzdd: Zip disks were much less floppy than floppies. They felt more similar to a single magnetic hard disk platen. Presumably the stiffness was what enabled the head to float above the medium, while also allowing tighter read/write timing because it wasn't subject to such variation. Having a single manufacturer of the disks (at least initially) probably also helped.

sublinear: Was it really the iMac that did it? I don't think I remember anyone saying that until recent years. I always thought USB 2.0 was just too good to ignore and addressed all the pain points manufacturers had with USB 1.1 being too slow.What I recall being sold for Mac were FireWire peripherals back in the late 90s and most of the 2000s.

gugagore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlopticalA related technology with a name that already answers your question.

maximinus_thrax: > I don't even think I've seen a single on here in Russia in the 90s.I'm not surprised, considering they were expensive. That doesn't mean they weren't popular in the west.

konart: CDs where not cheap either, mind you. Yet CDs replaced cassettes rather quickly.

ramses0: The other "has been" technology of the era was the "LS-120 SuperDisk". It was backwards compatible with standard 1.44MB 3.5" disks but you could buy special disks with 120MB capacity, and you didn't need to take up two slots on your front bays for both floppy and zip (and could write back to standard 1.44MB disks when taking some files to campus or sharing with "normal" computers). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk...in retrospect as the article states: swept away by CD-rw and USB sticks, but a great technology! There really was a critical gap in "I need to back up _all_ my files or coursework for the semester" or "Wouldn't it be great to be able to fit TEN games on a floppy instead of ONE game on ten floppies?"It really was a different era!

comrade1234: "The problem was estimated by Iomega to affect around 0.5% of Zip drives,..."I guess I was just majorly unlucky. clickclickclickclick*...

lizknope: TL ; DRFloppy disks were tiny and slowZip drives in 1995 were around $200 and 100MB disk for about $20CD-R burners in 1995 were $1000 and blank CD-R were about $15 eachBy 1999 CD-R burners were around $125 and blank discs were around $1 and dropping fast. I remember when they were $0.10 for a 700MB disc in the 2000s

nubinetwork: Jaz was really where the technology excelled, but it also had its own problems, and after dealing with zip failures, iomega was basically dead.

TRiG_Ireland: I remember using one only once, while working on computerising the school library. (I did that as a summer job, between school years.)

swiftcoder: The iMac certainly accelerated the adoption curve. There were USB ports on other PCs, but since they also had normal (at the time) ports, no PC users were going out and buying all-new USB peripherals.Apple's decision to leave out all the other ports meant that a bunch of folks were forced to buy new USB peripherals (and/or adapters), and gave peripheral manufacturers a dedicated market for USB

amelius: Speaking of backup solutions, why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in cost now?

sublinear: I'm not really convinced.It seems that even Apple quickly caved in and put FireWire on the G3 iMac when they updated the design to a slot loader.I don't have anything against Apple, but USB before the 2000s was pretty bad. It seems weird that people are now thinking otherwise.

voxadam: I remember installing a SCSI Zip drive into my roommate's Akai S5000 or S6000 sampler. He and I repeatedly debated whether or not hardware samplers would soon lose out to software solutions. He was absolutely convinced that there was no way in hell that the precision of hardware solutions would ever lose out to the flexibility of software. In the end, I was right, I'm pretty sure the S5000 and S6000 were some of the last truly hardware samplers of the era. Still, that Akai was a sexy bit of kit back then. As sure as I was that software would eventually win out it was sad to see the amazing engineering and precision of the hardware that was finally overtaken.

forinti: I bought one of these. In those days, I could keep the JDK in a box of floppies or it could fit in one Zip. Unfortunately, you had to carry your drive with you, because few people had one. So it only really made sense as backup media for me.

michaelbuckbee: Partially this was solved by the ZipDrive being designed for portability as well (I'm not even sure if there was ever a built in model). So if you needed to copy a large file and take it to a friends house you just took the drive with you.

swiftcoder: Zip drives were very cool, and even cooler, my folks owned a Powerbook G3 at the time, which allowed hot swapping a Zip drive into the expansion bay (in place of floppy/CD/battery)

TipsForCanoes: > Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnightThis is such an odd take to me.I sold and supported computers in the 1990s. Outside of a few industries, such as desktop publishing, Zip was not popular. The vast majority of computer owners never owned a Zip drive, unlike a floppy or soon to be CDROM.In fact, I sold far more QIC-80 tape drives for backups than Zip drives.Zip also didn't vanish overnight, it simple never caught on with most people. However, in the industries that used them, they hung on for a while.

jerf: I'd offer an alternative take, though it's not completely incompatible with the article: They are an example of the fact that you can buy putting your product on front of lots of people, but you can't buy keeping it there. It has to be good on its own merit to survive. Or at least, it gets more and more expensive to hold it in front of people.It was, in a lot of ways, too early. I never had one, and I never missed having one. I had other solutions to the problems when they happened. By the time I had the problem, it was not a cost-effective solution.I know people can pop up and say that it solved some problems for them, but I think the people who it solved problems for, in proportion to the price, weren't enough of a market. By the time they were, CD burners were a much cheaper solution.If they were 1/4 the price, it might have been a different story... but the price was pretty fundamental to the tech.You can't buy success. You can buy initial success, but not long term success.

LeCompteSftware: The real question is why were 1.44mb 3 1/2" floppy drives used for so long when they were totally obsolete by 1990. I would love to read a more coherent and unified history; my understanding is that there were tons of competing higher-capacity 3 1/2" drives between ~1985 and 1995, but software developers were stuck releasing on 1.44mb because that was the only format which worked reliably across manufacturers. By the time Zip drive came out, software was distributed on CD and higher-capacity floppies were really only used for (geographically) local data transfer.Wikipedia says there was a serious attempt to standardize a 20mb floppy in 1990 which fell apart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#High-capacity It's really not the case that Zip made some great leap forward; 15 years of technology's steady march didn't fully trickle down to consumer hardware because of compatibility issues between competing manufacturers.

traceroute66: > why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price nowFirst, LTO drives are conceptually simple, but if you've ever opened one up you'll know they are a feat of horribly complex engineering.Second, they are not a commodity product. Infact thanks to the magic cloud they are even LESS of a commodity product than they were 10 years ago because lots of people have either wholesale moved to the cloud or use S3 for backup.1 + 2 = Low volume product with lots of parts crammed into it = high manufacturing cost = high price.The orgs who still use LTO in their infra are the sort of orgs who don't blink at the price tag. The cost of the CTO's farts is probably more than a 5k tape drive.

arvid-lind: I remember really wanting one of these but I'm not really sure for what purpose. The idea of a substantial amount of data off a HDD seemed very appealing, and it was around that time where 1.44mb floppies were no longer sufficient but most people didn't have a CD-RW drive yet. Later in the 90s as CD-RW drives replaced CD-ROM drives there wasn't really a need for Zip drives.So it seems like to me they had an extremely short window to operate without much competition. CD-Rs being about $15 for a spindle and 6.5x the space was an easy pick.

dtech: It was probably very localized, where my parent worked in the late 90s every office room had at least one, so my parents also bought one for home so they could easily transfer files.It almost dissapeares overnight once 32MB+ usb drives became common, much more convenenient.

fractallyte: VHS video cassettes could be used as tape drives!There was this, from the same era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVidAnd I have this for my Amiga, also same era: http://www.hugolyppens.com/VBS.html

harel: Zip drives were great while they were great. I had one and it was amazing at the time. What was even more amazing, is that Toshiba Libretto in the photo. I wanted one since the first time I saw it, and into the early 2000 as a linux/retro machine and never got one. And even though today that form factor is not that special... Still...

mingus88: I worked in a university computer lab in the late 90s and these drives were very popular. Burning a CD was not a similar solution.People needed primary portable storage and Zip drives were amazing solutions before USB drives.The school gave each student just 15MB of storage for their email account, which was also their homedir storage for any other school projectBut the labs had at least a few stations with Zip drivesThe article quotes a pretty low failure rate overall but I suspect college students were seeing these fail a lot more because they just threw the disks in their bags and walked around to class all day. Having to deal with someone whose only copy of their work was on one of these triggers a traumatic response in me.

amelius: > Second, they are not a commodity product.Are you sure, there's millions of small-to-medium businesses that could use a good and cheap backup solution for terabytes of data.

swiftcoder: > but USB before the 2000s was pretty badIndeed. So bad that no one apart from Apple would have tried to go all-in on it. I doubt things like USB mice and keyboards would ever have happened if Apple didn't give it a kick in the behindFirewire was indeed a nice addition when that came along, but it always remained the domain of pricey high-bandwidth devices.

sublinear: I did some more digging to find out that the infamous BSOD demo with Bill Gates on stage was meant to show off plug and play on Windows 98 and caused by a USB scanner.This happened 4 months before the release date of the first iMac.https://youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84