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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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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.
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:
- long term storage
- 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.
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.
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.
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. :dubious:
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.
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. 
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…?)
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.
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.
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. :eek:
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.
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.)
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…
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?