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
The first clue is that “Click of Death” is an actual technical term the company uses on their troubleshooting page.
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.
The media was quite expensive (around $ 10 each) and even more delicate than floppies re handling. Thumb drives and CDRs win across the board.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For someone who’s never owned a zip drive, would anyone care to explain what the “click of death” was?
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:
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.