Why weren't Iomega ZipDrives more popular?

[Agent Foxtrot]

When my dad got the first ZipDrive I ever saw years go, I was amazed. "One hundered megs on a single disk the same size as a floppy? For sure this would replace the standard 1.44 MB floppies!"

But it didn't. 3.5" 1.44 MB floppies are still standard for every computer built. Why? I can understand that they came out roughly the same time as the advent of the CD-RW, but I personally feel that recording and reading a CD-ROM is sloppy in comparison. What's the deal?

Adam

[CynicalGabe]

The first clue is that "Click of Death" is an actual technical term the company uses on their troubleshooting page.

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

I'd say it's because writable CDs came along and blew everything else out of the water. They were cheaper and almost as capacious as anything out there. Zip disks remained relatively expensive, and the next generation JAZ disks astronomically so. When I was still using a JAZ drive, a single removable disk for it cost somewhere around $80.

[astro]

The media was quite expensive (around $ 10 each) and even more delicate than floppies re handling. Thumb drives and CDRs win across the board.

[Monstre]

For storage media geared towards that particular size range (100 MB, 200 MB, etc), ZIP drives were the more popular ones. They beat out competitors like the SyQuest EZ drive, for the most part.

The "Click of Death" was an early setback -- I had one of those (SCSI connection). But they fixed that problem, settled the class action suits, and ended up becoming the more popular choice for either coming pre-installed with a machine, or for separately bought internal or external storage. (ZIP did better than JAZ, too -- JAZ media was much more cost prohibitive).

But really, I'd say that the advent of writable CD media quickly replaced the popularity of ZIP in terms of typical computer options. Why didn't it replace the floppy? Well, convincing the world to get rid of the floppy has been difficult with CD media, too -- the floppy has been pretty ingrained for a while.

Although for reliability, I much prefer ZIP (as it is now -- post-"Click of Death") to floppy disks -- the latter are terribly unreliable, especially PC-formatted disks, I've noticed. (For me, Mac-formatted floppy disks have developed "bad sectors" with much less frequency than my PC ones).

CD-writability came out so soon after ZIP began gaining popularity that it quickly became the replacement, with cheaper media and larger storage capacity.

[Monstre]

Oh, and if the question were slightly altered to "Why aren't ZIP drives more popular NOW?" -- I'd have to say the answer is definitely "flash drives" (thumb drives, whatever your brand of choice calls theirs).

ZIPs still had the advantage (when CD-R first came out) that they were easier for removable storage that you didn't necessarily want to be permanent. CD-RW obviously took a bite out of that advantage, but flash drives are even easier for it now. I haven't used my ZIP disks much since I got a 512 MB flash drive a few months ago. (I still used them when the option was burning a permanent CD-R or using ZIP drives for transporting files).

[Sattua]

I really can't remember the last time I saw or handled a 3.5" floppy. And, for a couple of years, all of my university's computer labs had built-in ZIP drives. Ah, those were the days!

[paulberserker]

I'd say that too. When was the last time anyone used a floppy?

Still use a Zip disc and drive for transferring stuff from work to home. The 2 discs I'm using are well over 5 years old, although i've reformatted them about a million tiimes. Networking all our Macs and PCs made them fairly redundant for work purposes.

[Jayn_Newell]

Originally Posted by paulberserker

I'd say that too. When was the last time anyone used a floppy?

Last Monday. And I'll be using one again later today. My copy editing teacher uses them for handing out assignments, and I save my work to that rather than the school server (also useful for some students handing in work--not everyone has printing priviledges). So they still have their uses.

[fishbicycle]

At the radio station where I work, we are forced to use them every day. The automation system was designed by one of the engineers. It runs on three 75 MHz computers running DOS, and the only way to transfer sound files onto them is via Zip disks. We will be so happy when the new automation system arrives. It'll be Windows and have a secure intranet, so we can drag and drop files from our desktops.

[Finagle]

Zip drives were insanely popular when they came out. Everyone had them. Iomega stock climbed out of the basement and went up a factor of 15 or 30.

But there was a very narrow window of opportunity there. At the time, the competition was floppy drives. Various manufacturers were trying, with varied success, to increase the capability and reliability of the floppy. There were various expensive optical or removeable drives. And 100 Megabytes was still a lot of storage -- at the time, a 600 MB hard drive was pretty hefty.

But Iomega grew, I think, faster than they could keep up. They had reliability problems which didn't win them any fans. Their 1GB product (Jazz drive?) had very expensive media. At the same time, hard drive prices were falling rapidly and capacity was growing. Soon, 100 MB wasn't big enough. The 200 MB Zip drive wasn't a big success. And CD writers started becoming affordable.


So, bottom line, Zip drives occupied an ecological niche that only existed for a couple or three years. After that, they weren't big enough, fast enough, reliable enough, or cheap enough.

[keeper0]

The main reason they weren't more popular is that they weren't popular enough.


If I burned something onto a CD-R, I knew that I could use that on pretty much any computer. If I wrote it to a ZIP disk, I had better hope the computer I was going to had a drive.

If I could have had more confidence in computers having ZIP drives, then the medium would have seemed more appealing.



And, yeah, today the flash drives kick ass.

[mhendo]

For someone who's never owned a zip drive, would anyone care to explain what the "click of death" was?

[Monstre]

mhendo - basically the drive would start clicking, when trying to read data and put a directory display on screen - sometimes resulting in a long delay, but eventually resulting in a damaged disk that it was no longer usable.

I had one of these -- an original SCSI ZIP drive on an older Mac. And lost a couple ZIP disks and some files as a result. Iomega eventually replaced that drive with a refurbished one that didn't have the click-of-death problem.

Here are some sites with more info:

What is the "Click of Death"?

Zip Click of Death, what it really is

[Synthesis]

One of the biggest reasons they aren't as popular is because of the internet and greater presense of high speed connectivity. People use email, and other net based connectivity to move stuff around.

[ftg]

Note that anybody and everybody can make floppy and CDRW drives. (There's a royalty fee for the latter, but obviously not big enough to crimp a manufacturer's budget.) Iomega didn't really open up the format. They allowed a couple other companies to sell their drives with different labels on them, but there weren't dozens of factories on the Pacific Rim churning them out by the zillions. So that kept the prices high.

Cost drives most things in PC hardware land. You have to reach a certain magic number of units produced to get to that sweet spot of making $ on "Volume, Volume, Volume!"

[mhendo]

Originally Posted by Monstre

mhendo - basically the drive would start clicking, when trying to read data and put a directory display on screen - sometimes resulting in a long delay, but eventually resulting in a damaged disk that it was no longer usable.

Thanks for the info.

My wife had a zip drive for her old PII 233MHz laptop. I used it a couple of times, and it just seemed so slow and clunky. When i got my first PC after moving to the US, back in 2000, i contemplated getting a zip drive. The guy are the little computer store where i bought it recommended against it, saying that burning data onto CDs was far more reliable, and that the constantly-decreasing price of CDs made that a good option economically too. I was increasinlgy grateful for his advice as time went on.

Originally Posted by Synthesis

One of the biggest reasons they aren't as popular is because of the internet and greater presense of high speed connectivity. People use email, and other net based connectivity to move stuff around.

I think this is crucial nowdays.

I have a Gmail account, and my university gives me 150megs of free server space, so if i need to move a reasonably large file around, i find it's generally easiest just to put it on the web somewhere. My wife and i also have a 256meg USB key for this sort of thing.

[Knowed Out]

There's also the fact that newer models of computers don't have the ports to accommodate them. Also, with external zip drives, you had to rig the cables with your printer's parallel ports, which was a bitch. I for one was glad to see those clunky things go when I got my upgrade at work.

[Padeye]

We've reached a point in removable storage where an incrementally better version of what we had before is no longer the best choice. The price of 256MB thumb drives is almost trivial and 1-2GB models are quite reasonable. I get by fine with a 256MB thumb drive and CD burner in my work laptop.

[slortar]

I was also charmed that the major tech support advice we got (at work) from Iomega whenever anything would break (usually taking the zip disk with it) was "So sorry. Replacement drives can be ordered directly from Iomega.com for a new low price..."

And that happened quite a bit. Sure, they were higher capacity than floppies, but they kept the floppy's fragility with crappy, low-quality propietary hardware. I'm so glad I managed to talk my company out of using them. I hated having to troubleshoot those pieces of crap.

I think I still have a zip drive at home that I got back in '97 or '98. Can't say I precisely miss it.

[Finagle]

Pretty much all my zip discs and drive have gone into the Big Pile O' Antiquated Crap That I Paid Too Much For in my spare bedroom. Along with the SCSI hard drives, the scanner that no longer has connectivity to any machine I own, and a couple of old computers. It's an inevitable progression from the BPOACTIPTMF to the garbage, with the speed being dependant on how much the object originally cost.

[DougC]

- - - I never saw a Zip drive that worked well. At the time, I was attending a local college, and they had PC's running Win98 and NT, and I bought a zip drive because many of the school computers had internal zip drives in them--at that point, rewritable-CD drives were just becoming available, and so they cost far more.
- The external zip-250 drive I bought was made supposedly long after the click of death issues, but it still only worked well for about eight months before it refused to read or write any disks at all. Along the way, it would frequently bomb out after I had stored data on it, and a disk could be used if it was re-formatted, losing all that was stored on it. For a while after it stopped reading when laid flat on the desk, it would only read if the drive was placed in its sideways-bracket. Then it wouldn't even do that. The school's computers had internal drives that seemed to work somewhat better, but not real well--I remember that if you wanted to put 90 megs of files on a 100-meg disk, it would take like 15 minutes to do it.
...I experienced the same failures on my own home Win98 PC as everyone else in my classes who bought one did, and we saw the same failures on the school's computers as well. I really only bought it for two database classes because the class project files would not fit on a floppy disk, and the Zip drive did work for the duration of those classes--but it cost $180 or so, if I remember right. The two 100-meg disks were $9 each, and the 250-meg was $25 (I only ever owned the three disks for it). By the time it stopped working totally it was over a year old, so there was no recourse. I eventually threw the drive and disks in the trash.
.....
- And the most-ironic part of it all is that Iomega sent me email spam for YEARS afterwards, even though I repeatedly tried to opt-out of their mailing list. I would not pay $1 for anything with their name on it today.
~

[gfloyd]

We have zip drives at work and I hate them. I don't have my own zip disk, so I need to borrow one on the rare occasions that I needed to use them. My boss looses his on a semi-weekly basis. I hate floppies, too. I used to be required to carry them for school and they would always break. Oh, and good luck with large files on floppies. No, I'll take my flash memory stick. I love the thing. It was a gift, but my parents only paid 25 or so for it. I always have it with me, as it's on my car keys. I'll never go back to anything else.

[msmith537]

Originally Posted by Agent Foxtrot

But it didn't. 3.5" 1.44 MB floppies are still standard for every computer built. Why? I can understand that they came out roughly the same time as the advent of the CD-RW, but I personally feel that recording and reading a CD-ROM is sloppy in comparison. What's the deal?

Adam

The deal is what we in the technology business call "network externalities". basically if you are developing a product that interacts with other products, it's to your advantage for it to work with existing systems. The basic problem with a Zip disk is that it needs another Zip drive to run. A CD-R or CD-RW or a "thumb" drive on the other hand can run on pretty much any computer with a CD Rom drive or a USB port - which is about all of them.

External media has basicly two functions:
1) long term storage
2) transferring files

For storage where you just need to write once or infrequently, the 200 MB zip drive can't compete with the 700+MB CD-R or 5GB+ DVD-R (I forget the exact capacities).

For transferring files, it's easier now just to email the small ones, post them on a file server, use a thumb drive or just put them on a CD-R and throw it away for 10 cents a disk.


The Zip drive met a gap in the marketplace for a few years. Basically that short period of time between when files were still small enough to fit on 1.44MB disks and CD-RW were too expensive for general consumption.

[kanicbird]

There have been attempts to update the floppy, none really worked out.

One of the early ones was a 21 mb floptical drive, which I had high hopes for. Basically a floppy drive that could also read the 21 mb floptical drives. There was aslo a 2.88 mb floppy that flopped.

I think what doomed the zip drive was the priority nature ofhte drive and media, plus the high cost of the media. At the same time CD-RW's started to come out. I think I-omega priced them to get max profit short term instead of establishing them as standards.

Since they were never true standards you couldn't count on boot off of them so they couldn't replace a floppy.

Also HD's were expanding so the need for removable storage was less, and the need to transfer data depended on both computers having compatable drives.

[Voyager]

Originally Posted by Agent Foxtrot

But it didn't. 3.5" 1.44 MB floppies are still standard for every computer built. Why? I can understand that they came out roughly the same time as the advent of the CD-RW, but I personally feel that recording and reading a CD-ROM is sloppy in comparison. What's the deal?

Adam

The laptop I bought recently doesn't ,have a floppy, and with a bunch of flash memories around, all of which I got free from various conferences, I don't need one.

I had a SyQuest Sparc drive since it was cheaper with more capacity than a Zip drive. Alas, they went under and I can't find XP drivers, so it is not too useful for my creaky Win98 system. No problem - my MP3 player (also free) has enough storage to back up everything I need and move it to my laptop where I can burn a CD.

I use floppies to back up my checkbook in Quicken. But so many files are > 1.4 M, that they are not too useful anymore.

[photopat]

We occasionally get files on Zip disks, but not as often as we did 3 or 4 years ago. It's to the point now where I grimace when I see one because, having experienced the "Click of Death" on an internal Zip drive, I have to go to the other side of our building to use an external to download the files and then bring them through the network to my G5. (Yeah, I know it doesn't have to be that way, but try telling my boss we need another Zip drive with a USB connector, or that we really need to upgrade the other computer.) Unfortunately, we also use a fair number of floppies for transferring small files from my Macs to another department's PCs so they can be translated for a CNC machine. After several uses the floppies get funky too, so we've got a lot of square coasters here. I'd use CD's for all the transfers but it just seems so wasteful for files that are usually no larger than 500k.

Now, if you want to talk about a real dinosaur, we still have a dozen SyQuest disks (and 2 or 3 inoperable drives) here that I keep saying we should just pitch, since we've rescued as many files as we could, but my boss is loath to get rid of anything he paid "good" money for.

[Monstre]

Originally Posted by mhendo

When i got my first PC after moving to the US, back in 2000, i contemplated getting a zip drive.

Well, nowadays I wouldn't recommend getting one new in the store. I have a handful of internal ZIP drives, from machines I've picked up at surplus auctions for real cheap. For instance, I bought a machine a couple years ago for $10, pulled out the ZIP drive to put in my brother's computer, then turned around and fixed up the rest and sold the machine for more than I paid for it.

The old SCSI ZIP drives were better and faster than the PC ones that connected via parallel port (those were godawful slow) -- with the exception, of course, of the drives with the click-of-death problem.

Originally Posted by dougc

I never saw a Zip drive that worked well.

I have -- I still have internal ZIPs in a couple of my machines, and I have an external USB-powered ZIP drive I got for cheap over a year ago (which is probably the only external model worth anything nowadays). They all work fine. Only one I ever had a problem with was the original SCSI one for my Mac at the time.

However, I think the biggest thing that makes them obsolete is the prevalence of USB connected flash drives. Moreso than CDs. Because I know other people besides myself that don't really bother with CD-RW, and just use CD-R. And then use other removable methods for non-permanent storage. I still used ZIPs for this until recently, when I got a flash drive. I still have some old software on ZIP drives, which I will have to go pull off eventually. But for quick file transfers between computers, the flash drive is very nice.

[pulykamell]

As I said before in another thread this week, in my experience, iOmega makes a terrible, unreliable storage product, and I will never buy from the company again.
I had three brand new iOmega drives break on me in the period of one year, along with destroying hundreds of megabytes of data at a time. Data I will never see again. They are worthless pieces of crap. Every single one of them had the click of death. My friends didn't fare much better with these drives, either. It's possible they've improved their product since I had these problems (1998), but I refuse to give them my business, so I don't know. Besides, these days, DVD mass storage is cheaper, more reliable, and much more common than Zip.

[pulykamell]

Originally Posted by photopat

Now, if you want to talk about a real dinosaur, we still have a dozen SyQuest disks (and 2 or 3 inoperable drives) here that I keep saying we should just pitch, since we've rescued as many files as we could, but my boss is loath to get rid of anything he paid "good" money for.

I mentioned this in the other thread. SyQuest is perhaps the only storage system I had WORSE problems with than iOmega. We used to back-up our data on SyQuests years ago at the college newspaper I worked at. One year later, when we went back into the archives, half the cartridges were corrupted and could not be read.

[Sunspace]

I sepnt part of last week exhuming and archiving the contents of our old disk archives from their Syquest and Zip250 disks. The computer that held the Zip drive and the SCSI connector for the Syquest drive is beinf retired.

Total archive size? Less than 4 GB.

All of it will fit no problem on a single-layer DVD, let alone the dual-layer disc I have in front of me. Except that I'm not putting it on a DVD. I just threw it into our network storage. Let IS take care of the backups... that's their job.

[Mehitabel]

For Christmas 1999, my Dad and I gave each other new computers--one full price, mine at half. They were identical. Dad put a zip drive in his and after a few months got another one for me. He'd been using them since the mid-90s on his own computer.

I could not get my machine to recognize the thing at all. The help desk sent out a new drive (their first and last resort, it seems) and still nada. Fuggeaboutit. Now I have a burner that Dad uses sometimes. He always makes two copies because of the click o' death. I'll have to send him that page.

[Boldface Type]

Hm, well someone has to speak up for the Zip, so I will...

Every (university) where I've worked has used Zip drives extensively, and I've never had a single problem with one, nor has anyone I know had a problem. I have an external Zip 250 USB at home. I got this back when they first came out, and it's working fine many years later.

IME, the discs are very robust - I quite often run home from work with a Zip disc in my rucksack, and the jiggling hasn't yet caused any problems.

There's now a 750Mb Zip drive, but I think that'll probably be the end of the road for the 'umble Zip - pen drives and the like will be victorious. I know that when my Zip drive or discs finally die, I'll almost certainly go for a pen drive, or just stick with rewriteable DVDs et al (but how many rewrites will they cope with, I wonder...?)

[Homebrew]

Within the printing industry the Zip quickly pushed aside the SyQuest discs that would die if you looked at it the wrong way. It was cheaper, faster and more reliable. At $10 each the disc could be sent to a service bureau and wouldn't be missed too much if you didn't get it back. At 10 cents each, CDs, did the same thing to the Zip. It is cheaper, faster and more reliable. It's that simple.

[RTFirefly]

There's clearly no question of why the Zip drive hasn't been able to compete during the past few years, when CD-RW drives and whatnot became cheap and common.

The real question is, why didn't they do better in the mid-to-late 1990s window when their main competition was floppies?

When the Zip drive first came along, 3.5" floppies had only been around for a few years - and they, in turn, had replaced 5.25" floppies, which were actually floppy. It wasn't like the damned things went back to the Stone Age.

I'm thinking that Zip drives would have been much more popular if, when you bought a computer during that time, a Zip drive would have been a normal part of the package. In order to make this happen, IOmega would have probably had to give the rights to build Zip drives to the computer companies for free, and make their money off the disks alone.

But since you couldn't reliably use Zip discs to transfer data between computers (since it generally wasn't likely that the other person's computer had a Zip drive), most of us could only use Zip discs as a backup storage medium, and that really wasn't worth shelling out $100 or so for a Zip drive.

[Agent Foxtrot]

I'll also have to speak up on behalf of iOmega. I've never, ever had a problem with any ZipDrive I've ever owned. However, I have some old files I'll want to access again someday, and now I fear the "Click of Death" thanks to you all.

Adam

[Monstre]

Originally Posted by Agent Foxtrot

I'll also have to speak up on behalf of iOmega. I've never, ever had a problem with any ZipDrive I've ever owned. However, I have some old files I'll want to access again someday, and now I fear the "Click of Death" thanks to you all.

Adam

Glad we could help fuel your paranioa...

Although how old are your ZIP drives? I could be mistaken, but I thought the problem was only on the earliest drives -- that they'd fixed the problem later on. I've never had any problems with the internal ZIP drives in my machines, or the external USB one. Just that first SCSI one -- shortly after ZIP drives came out.

[Medea's Child]

I only used Zip drives at school and when I worked at the hospital. The school was in the process of being primarily focused on flash drives when I left (I love my flash drive!), but the hospital liked using Zip disks to shuttle big files around to the doctors. (I can see the hospital getting networked better and ditching the Zip drive, but not for a while.)

[elfkin477]

Originally Posted by Agent Foxtrot

3.5" 1.44 MB floppies are still standard for every computer built.

No longer true. I'm planning on buying a USB floppy drive since I have a boxful of floppies I can't access since my new computer didn't come with a floppy drive. Neither did the 100 new computers at work, or the new computer my brother got a week ago, or...

[Dr. Rieux]

I used 100mb Zip disks for over three years for carrying my files around from one school computer to another. The only trouble I ever had was with one certain Zip drive that would occasionally overwrite a newly inserted disk with the contents of the previous disk.

What is a "thumb" drive, anyway? One of those little memory card thingies?

[Mr. Moto]

My wife's newer laptop didn't come with a floppy drive. A couple of times, I've read files into it using the floppy drive in the desktop we have shared over the network.

It's not an issue that comes up often.

[DocCathode]

Originally Posted by Dr. Rieux

What is a "thumb" drive, anyway? One of those little memory card thingies?

Yep. Alot of the usb flash drives come in a housing designed to make it easy to plug them in and pull them off. Apparently, the best ergonomic design for this looks kinda like a thumb.

Re Zip Drives

As others have said, most people knew that cheap cd burners were coming. Why spend money on a drive which will hold less, has disks that cost more and won't work in most machines, when you can just wait a few years and buy a cd burner?

When my boss was organizing his yearly biofeedback/EEG conference, one of the presenters mailed us his presentation data, and papers on the research he was doing. He sent it on a zip disk. Nobody in the office had a zip drive.

[Trunk]

I work for a software company, and I've never used a Zip drive, and never even had the need.

For meetings with clients, we bring a lap top.

For in-house tranfers, we have a "transfer directory" on the network.

For excel/word/powerpoint transfers, email works fine.

For distributing software to a client, we use a file-server, basically.

When we get new data-bases from clients, it's almost always on CDs that they'll send through the mail.

I don't know what anyone would need a Zip drive for and I work on a computer 8 hours per day. Even when they first came out, I remember people saying, "you can put 100 MB on this, and just move it to another computer."

And I was thinking, "I've never had to move 100 MB of anything to another computer."

[Finagle]

Originally Posted by Trunk

And I was thinking, "I've never had to move 100 MB of anything to another computer."

Then you've never worked with graphics.

[Sunspace]

...or video.

[Magiver]

If USB had been around when they first came out it might be a different story. It's great for working on large projects between computers. I bought one of the 750 mb units and rarely use it even though it works faster/better than a cd burner. Usually I just use the 1gb chip out of my camera if I want to swap a bunch of stuff.

[Wile E]

Why weren't Iomega ZipDrives more popular?

Because I bought one.



Guess who killed the beta VCR, too?

[Tentacle Monster]

The LS-120 drive didn't help, either. It could accommodate a 1.44 MB floppy or a special 120MB disk. I'm not sure exactly how popular they are/were; all I know is that my previous two computers had them and you can still get the 120MB disks.

[Trunk]

Originally Posted by Finagle

Then you've never worked with graphics.

Originally Posted by sunspace

...or video.

Wrong on both accounts.

My first job was with a start-up company developing efficient video conferencing software. I worked on mathematical engines, but everything we did was over a LAN.

I don't think the nature of the application has much to do with whether you have to use a Zip drive, but rather the nature of your network, and how you interact with your clients.

[Trunk]

Actually, what I'd offer up is that Zip drives would have become useful (and popular) if computer memory proceeded like it has for the last 10-12 years, but computer networking remained like it was in 1994.

I don't think those "thumb sticks" or whatever you call them are going to prosper either. I mean, for transferring pictures, videos, music to and from computers, you almost always can just use a USB connection between two devices.

I don't "do" music over the computer, though, so I might be wrong about that.