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Rank: Troubleshooter
Joined: 1/30/2009
Posts: 42
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As stated in the article - the inability to get the data from the zip drive ultimately sealed the fete of zip drives. had experience with these drives at 2 different places - neither use this back up any more. You should now do an article on the sony dat backup drives. These drives are a dying breed - 12 gb of data is just too small for a backup drive. The backup media is too dear. The need to repair the disk drive - and the price, means that my solution of backing up to a pc and then zipping the back up to an external hard rive - 1tb - is a definite winner! Comment made about the PC Authority article: Whatever happened to....Zip Disks?? Zip drives were once the top choice for storage, well before DVDs and USB sticks gained in popularity. But whatever happened to this once mega-popular format and what sealed its demise?What do you think? Join the discussion.
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Rank: Elite
Moderator
Joined: 7/11/2008
Posts: 1,181
Location: Mackay North QLD
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kiss of death
five fingers of death
blue screen of death
click of death
red ring of death
Got any more?
Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.
Ask questions. There's no such thing as a stupid one, just stupid answers. (mostly)
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Rank: Enthusiast
Joined: 4/5/2008
Posts: 60
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ZIP Disks were certainly the go in their day. It was the backup medium of choice for many small businesses that really only needed to backup less than 50MB, such as MYOB files. I had many clients that swore by them.
Although CD's and DVD's could hold much more data, it was the flexibility of the ZIP that made it popular - it worked like a really, really, big Floppy Disk and was simple to backup to.
The USB flash drive is what started their downfall. Works in the same way, without the needing a ZIP drive and can hold LOTS more data.
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Rank: I'm new around here
Joined: 11/7/2009
Posts: 1
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Some corrections and just to set the record straight comments. I worked on the development of the Zip drive and was familiar with some of these issues.
First, the click-of-death (COD) was not an inherent defect in the design of the Zip drive. The COD occurred when the read-write head of the Zip drive had it's suspension defomed due to shock. This would not only mis-align the head, but would also make the head not fly correctly (closely) on the Zip media. At one point in the life of the Zip drive a small foam bumper was removed from the acutator to save manufacturing costs. This foam bumper protect the head and it's suspension from being damaged during an uncontrolled removal of the head from the media (power removed from drive due to power failure or plug being pulled). Once this was discovered this foam bumper was replaced. It is my understanding that only a subset of Zip drives suffered from the COD. It was this group.
About interchangeability of media -- This actually was a strength of the Zip drive. Zip disks could be moved from Zip drive to zip drive and they just worked. CD & CDRW media, that did replace Zip, were notoriously poor at interchangeabilty of discs between drives. Too many different manufacturers I think was the basic problem. My estimate is that Zip disk with Zip drive interchangeability was >98% while at that time CD & CDRW interchangeability rate was < 60%.
Always good to see the Zip era remembered!
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Rank: I'm new around here
Joined: 11/7/2009
Posts: 2
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FredT, you might be able to answer this - was the later "Click!" 40 MB drive named to exploit the bad press surrounding the Zip drive? Seemed like quite a coincidence! The Zip (and Jazz) were embraced by graphic artists at the time but then dropped like a hot potato once the problems starting showing up. My GF was one such person and we spend much time trying to make disks read and figure out how to stop them from getting damaged. The rumor was that once a Zip disk was damaged it would further damage any drive it was used in. Once, after I complained about the reliability of Zips in a forum I received a polite but firm email from Iomega basically telling me to take my problems to them, not the public! Other fall-out from the Zip fiasco was the large number of refurbished drives seen on the shelf at Fry's Electronics.
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