Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight(xda-developers.com) |
Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight(xda-developers.com) |
Indeed, it was about reliability in the end for Iomega. LGR Covered it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBhEaMp8mw
Then I got to experience the click of death and the internet connection was bumped to 100Mbit and I didn't need to replace my zip drive.
I also learned a 90's bubble investment tip on TV that if you went to the companies office and night and all the lights were on they were cooking and worth investing in. And the TV investor said he visited Iomega and they were cooking.
https://www.deseret.com/1999/8/20/19461583/iomega-president-...
Floppy disks were tiny and slow
Zip drives in 1995 were around $200 and 100MB disk for about $20
CD-R burners in 1995 were $1000 and blank CD-R were about $15 each
By 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
I actually bought one of these Panasonic PD Phase-change Dual drives in 1995. It was $500 and the cartridges were $30 for 650MB. I formatted them as ext2 and used the standard cp / mv / rm commands. This technology later evolved into the DVD-RAM standard. DVD-RW and DVD+RW were very different.
Nowadays probably would need an USB converter, assuming everything still works.
I guess I was just majorly unlucky. clickclickclickclick*...
This 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.
For awhile, the Ontario Health Insurance Program allowed physicians to submit their billing in person via zip drive. I remember depositing the disks for my parents (funny the things one remembers)
This was the time between paper billing and digital submissions.
...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!
up until mid 90s it was floppies, then since mid 90s it was CDR
it's like saying minidiscs dominated the 90s, which would be as stupid
Macs did much better with removable drives for years since the users were used to "ejecting" the disk instead of just pulling it out.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.1/cdrom/packet-writing.ht...
https://reactivated.net/software/packetwriting/
And in my googling for those links I find that Jens is still the block device maintainer and submitted a patch in 2025 to remove support for packet writing.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-To-Remove-pktcdvd
> "This driver has long outlived it's utility, and it's broken and unloved. The main use case for this was direct mount with UDF of cd-rw drives that required 32kb packets. It would collect writes into that size and write them out in multiples of that. That's not a common use case anymore, the world has moved on from those kinds of media. To make matters worse, it's actively breaking setups where it's not even required or useful."
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.
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 had already been attempted in 1990, and the LS-120, which had the exact same dimensions as a 3.5” floppy (and could read those), launched in 1996, so it was not really exceptional at 6 doubling in 8 years from the 1.44MB floppy.
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.
Improvements in coatings improve the data per track, but no improvement was needed for increasing the amount of tracks. On a 1.44MB drive there are 100 000 bits per track, but only 80 tracks per side. Or, in other terms, the length of a single bit along the track (on the innermost track) was ~1.2µm, and the width of that same bit, sideways to the track, was ~200µm, for an aspect ratio of 166:1. As far as the media was concerned, roughly 10:1 aspect ratio would have been more than enough, or a normal 1.44MB floppy could have supported more than a 1000 tracks per side.
The limiting factor was that old floppies had no way for the head to follow the track, it was just indexed into a fixed position by the drive mechanism. This meant that the tracks had to be ridiculously wide to support all the possible misalignment on both the reader and the writer. To improve track density, what was needed was some mechanism to make the head locate the tracks and follow them as the disk rotated under them. Iomega solved this by etching shallow concentric circles for the tracks on the surface of the disc. These rings were essentially invisible for the magnetic head, but allowed a separate laser to pick the up and follow them.
Steve Gibson has a good site with historical information from the time when these drives were still marketed and sold: https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq1.htm
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.
... But NEC beat IBM by already doing 'five blades' in 1988 selling PC-88 VA3 with 'Triple' or '2TD' format 3.5" floppy sporting 13MB unformatted 9MB formatted capacity. Same perpendicular head as ED, same magnetic medium, same bitrate, 3 times more tracks (240) while still using cheap stepper motor unlike ZIP head actuators, compatible with same standard ED floppy controller chips. Sadly no one in the west adopted it :(((
There was one more avenue for bumping capacity never really explored on PC - zone bit recording invented by Chuck Peddle in 1961 and supported by Floppy controllers in Macintoshes, Commodore (Chuck Peddle designed drives) and Victor 9000 (Chuck Peddle designed whole computer). Free 50% capacity bump. Victor 9000 pulled 1.2MB capacity out of Double Density 80 track 5 1/4 drive.
Combine 2TD wiht ZBR and we could have had cheap 13.5MB formatted capacity floppies since 1988.
A related technology with a name that already answers your question.
An article about an old and long abandoned technology naturally contains nothing new. What did you expect?
For a while I badly wanted a zip drive or the (syquest) ez 135 for personal use. But by the time I could afford that stuff I had a scsi board and cd writer… which was clearly the way.
First, 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.
Are you sure, there's millions of small-to-medium businesses that could use a good and cheap backup solution for terabytes of data.
There was this, from the same era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid
And I have this for my Amiga, also same era: http://www.hugolyppens.com/VBS.html
The SyQuest had a real hard drive platter in it so you knew it was robust. The Zip platter was harder than a floppy but softer than a hard drive, so you knew it wasn't as robust.
So I had no incentive to buy into Zip. I saw a few people use them but I assumed they'd never heard of SyQuest and didn't know better. I never had anyone ask for data on a Zip disk or want to give me data on a Zip disk, so I never bothered.
Later when the click-of-death started happening, I figured it would die off and people would switch to SyQuest, but then there was Jaz, which wasn't as popular as Zip, and then CD-ROM took over, which held a lot of data, but was still slow (in spite of IDE) and still not as robust as the SyQuest products.
In 1998, at their end, SyQuest had a 4.7 GB unit, I presume to compete with DVD.
IIRC, Iomega captured the consumer market with the Zip drive for mostly business reasons (better marketing, contracts with major retailers and PC OEMs, etc.).
those zip disks were not cheap 10$-15$ each for a paltry 100mb.
the rise of USB sticks really killed them. you could get a 128mb usb stick for similar or cheaper and you didn't need the clunky unreliable zip drive to use them.
The Zip drives that followed were abysmal. We sold a lot of them initially (I was working in a computer store in the early nineties), but sales cratered once the "click of death" became infamous. SyQuest drives suffered from similar reliability issues.
The founder of SyQuest, Syed Iftikhar, later left and set up another company called Castlewood, which introduced yet another removable drive called the Orb. The Orb was genuinely faster and more reliable than anything Iomega or SyQuest had offered.
But with the advent of cheap flash drives and faster broadband internet, transfer and storage of data shifted decisively away from spinning removable media, and the entire category quietly died, taking Castlewood, Iomega, Imation, and SyQuest with it.
It almost dissapeares overnight once 32MB+ usb drives became common, much more convenenient.
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.
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. By the standards of such products, Zip was relatively successful, because it did have some people it solved a problem for. It was just a minority of their customer base. Enough to hang on for a while, but not to take over the world.
It is the opposite of The Eternal Scroll. It is the hero we need.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuarkXPress
And we'd all have Zip drives and even internal Zip drives reader/writer in our G3. Can be seen on the picture here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_G3
They were big indeed and I'd say huge in the publishing industry. Then the CD writers and then DVD writers began to rule to earth.
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.
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.
I'm not surprised, considering they were expensive. That doesn't mean they weren't popular in the west.
Hell the first commercial ISP in the Netherlands only started in 1995.
By the time the digital age arrived for the general population CD ROM and DSL were a thing.
It is easy to forget that for decades computers were basically a sub culture thing that did not touch mainstream society.
Whereas with USB sticks all one needed was a USB port. I immediately wanted a stick.
But only a few years later, as you say, USB thumb drives were making Zip drives irrelevant.
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.
So when affordable CD-R became available, even though early drives were slow writers, they had the advantage that they could be read from practically any computer. With ubiquitous non-proprietary CD-ROM drives and the huge 700mb capacity, Zip drives were tossed as soon as someone bought a CD-R drive.
I remember that the biggest problems with Zip drives was that most Windows PCs didn’t come with SCSI and that they had some Frankenstein parallel port version.
For context when I bought my Zip drive, my internal hard drive was only 80MB and part of that was used as an emulated hard drive for my Apple //e card.
zip-drives where great - at least compared to what other possibilities where around these days:
overall, zip-drives where not that expensive, especially the medias.
but they died every now& then ...
so it was more or less only a possibility to transfer data, not so much to archive it! this was what cd-r and later dvd-r where there for :)
imho. the "real" problem where often the drives themselfs, they where available with various interfaces, the most common was (!) parallel / "printer-port" / centronics (!) .. veeery slow.
the "best" ones had scsi =?> fast etc. but you needed an scsi-controller with an external connector for that
if i remember it correctly, there where even IDE/PATA-drives available - but i think only internal ones - and later usb-variants (also slow) ...
btw. what where the alternative in the late 1990ties!?
* syquests
great drives, especially the 5.25 inch variants, but they where already "dated" by then. and the 3.5 inch variants where pretty expensive and had reliability-issues ...
additionally: lots of people mistook the 3,5 inch variants for floppy-disk-drives and ruined early models by inserting floppies into them =?> the later got some mechanical protection against that!
* (old) harddisks
my "medium of choice" where old hdds, which i plugged into the machines between which i wanted to transfer data ...
by far the "best" option, but also the most "technical" one ;)
just my 0.02€
Edit: Today I use just 2.5" SSDs in the same way. There's a small sata to usb-c adapter where I plug them in without any further enclosure.
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 project
But the labs had at least a few stations with Zip drives
The 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.
And students may have gotten some minimal, non-zero utility from it, but almost everything they would have been doing at the time would have fit on a floppy disk just fine. Maybe two. The Zip drive was slightly more convenient... for about $150 more. Aroud $300 inflation-adjusted.
That's not $300's worth of value, and especially not $300's worth of value for a college student. I can manage a couple of floppies and "that one time I had a really big project" for $300 as a college student.
Yes, I'm sure you have a story of that one guy who had an 80MB project that fit no other way. But think of all the people who had 96% empty drives because all their documents were tiny that don't come to mind.
You will note that there was no cohort of people coming out of college demanding Zip drives everywhere else in the world after them, because I doubt very many of your students came away with a strongly positive impression of the Zip drive, even for those for whom it worked perfectly.
This was a market where people were building PCs from no-name components in plain wrapping. Most everything I ordered was out of the back of a trade rag with classified ads that were nothing but tight listings of part numbers and prices. Zip Drive was akin to SoundBlaster in its uniquely flashy, colorful packaging, branded hardware offering.
I eschewed them for a while, and when SyQuest came out with a PC-compatible (and SCSI-compatible) competitor, I picked that up instead. Why? Because SyQuest had imprinted their brand on me when I saw every serious Apple user with a SyQuest on their desk or in their pocket. I knew that this was a tacit testimony of reliability. SyQuest had the necessary experience and R&D already in place to provide quality and reliability, where Zip had none of that reputation.
My SyQuest never failed or clicked, although it became obsolete at the same rate as the Zips. I never regretted not having a Zip drive, for sure!
What I recall being sold for Mac were FireWire peripherals back in the late 90s and most of the 2000s. By 2000, USB 2.0 was too good to ignore and addressed all the pain points manufacturers had with USB 1.1 being too slow. That's when I remember USB drives finally being practical and mainstream.
Needing large and Read-Write was the niche than CD-R and CD-RW did much better. Along with CDs in general, they just didn't do much more than span a small temporal gap in value proposition.
T
There simply was no other option at the time than Zip drives. Others did not strike the right balance of price, capacity, responsiveness, etc. Maybe Iomega paid to get them installed, I don’t know, but there really was no other option so I can easily see schools buying them just because they needed a solution.
USB thumb drives started appearing not long after, and they didn’t suffer from the click of death, so those became the preferred media by the time those people graduated school.
They also sucked from a support point of view. People would mistreat the tape. Store them next to giant magnets or on top of the microwave in the restaurant. Forget to run the weekly backup and then blame you when they lost files. I couldn't wait to get them on to CD-RW which showed up for SMBs very soon afterwards in the late 1990s, and then eventually to the cloud. What a relief to no longer need magnetic media.
The irony now is that many of the SMBs I see today (though I no longer consult for them) have effectively zero backup because all their business process is tied up in a SaaS that they do not control. Eg their website is on squarespace, their tasks are on Asana, and their finances are in Quickbooks. Any one of these goes dark, or out of business, or is vandalized and it's curtains for the whole business.
My experience with tape is very out of date but I doubt much has changed due to the nature of tape
Tape software sucks. Tape restores are cumbersome. A SMB can literally but a multi TB HDD and just drag and drop, and but the drive in a safe.
A SMB will need to hire someone who wants to deal with this niche tape storage, and why would they bother if they can use a NAS for that and a dozen other things at the same time
Tapes can have a shelf life of 30 years. If you need archival storage then tape is a great solution. For everybody else it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Overall they are much better of buying a few external HDDs. Standard interface, sufficient capacity. Just get trusted person to carry one out every month or three months. For continuous stuff just have NAS.
Yes, and that's exactly how small-to-medium business IT used to operate.
These days sadly most small-to-medium businesses are drinking the cloud koolaid.
You would be hard pushed to find a small-biz with a comms room these days, when back in the day every half-decent small-biz office would have a comms room with cab and a few servers in it.
Now most small-biz are on Microsoft or Gmail for mail and their office is full of laptops on WiFi.... nobody has any respect for good old-fashioned structured cabling these days either, sadly. ;(
It is what it is, sadly.
Hence only governments, enterprises and, ironically (if rumours are correct) the cloud providers (for their archival S3 products) are still buying tape.
In retrospect I think the only reason Zip was able to become the undisputed market leader in high-capacity disks is that CD-ROM fully took over commercial software distribution.
Oh they could and they did in Japan when those computers were sold. PC-88 is not IBM PC compatible.
That said, it's not too late... I still have my Amiga system in storage, and a VHS recorder.
It's good to hear, in retrospect, that you were able to use a storage medium that did not even exist when Amiga were discontinued. Which type of interface for the Zip drive works with it?
(It occurs to me that Zip disks presumably offer the great virtue, otherwise absent as I understand it for Amigans, of PC compatibility.)
However, since the Zip disks were formatted with an Amiga file system – I used PFS3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_File_System) – they couldn't be used with a PC.
I'm curious whether the data is still readable, after 30 years...
The magazines may have been wrong and their claims turned into an urban legend in the meantime, but it's part of the general sense of what I recall from, ugh, nearly 30 years back now.
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
By the time the iPod came around, Apple had adopted FireWire to handle devices that USB's then-limited bandwidth couldn't really support. USB peripherals like mouse/keyboards were already pretty widespread by then.
Hockey Puck mouse.
It seems that even Apple quickly caved in and put FireWire on the G3 iMac when they updated the design to a slot loader in 1999.
I don't have anything against Apple, but USB before the 2000s was pretty bad. It seems weird that people are now thinking otherwise.
When Firewire was introduced, it wasn't ever popular enough to get the self-sustaining popularity loop of "all the machines have it" <-> "all the peripheral makers support it".
Apple made that happen for USB. Not because USB was amazing in 1997, but because it was the only thing on what was then the cheapest new Mac.
Indeed. 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 behind
Firewire was indeed a nice addition when that came along, but it always remained the domain of pricey high-bandwidth devices.
Yup I do think that's true for Mac users, and questioning Apple fans' just-so stories are usually worthwhile to anyone curious. They sure do keep history alive and well. I mean, hey, The Beatles made an entire career out of doing that with their fans!
I just realized this month was Apple's 50th anniversary, so that's likely part of why this is making the rounds. I guess I have my answer.
Probably also worth noting the list of founding members of the USB-IF did not include Apple (not surprising). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Implementers_Forum
The motivations behind the "legacy-free PC" has its own Wikipedia page too which is pretty neat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy-free_PC
This happened 4 months before the release date of the first iMac.