Home > Zip drive

The Zip system was based loosely on Iomega's earlier Bernoulli Box system; in both systems, a set of read/write heads mounted on a linear actuator flies over a rapidly spinning floppy disk mounted in a sturdy cartridge. The Zip disk used smaller media (about the size of a 3.5" microfloppy, rather than the compact disc-sized Bernoulli media), and a simplified drive design that reduced its cost. This resulted in a disk that had all of the 3.5" floppy's convenience, but held much more data, and had performance that was much quicker than a standard floppy drive (though not directly competitive with hard drives). The original Zip drive had a data transfer rate of about 1 megabyte/second and a seek time of 28 milliseconds on average, compared to a standard 1.4 MiB floppy's 500 Kbit/s transfer rate and several-hundred millisecond average seek time.

The Zip system was introduced with a capacity of 100 megabytes, and quickly became a success as people used them to hold large files (especially bitmap files and other desktop publishingDesktop publishing or DTP is the process of editing and layout of printed material intended for publication, such as books, magazines, brochures, and the like using a personal computer. Desktop publishing software, such as QuarkXPress, is software specifi-related items) that regular floppy disks would not be able to handle. As time went on, Iomega eventually increased the capacity to 250 and later 750 megabytes, while improving the data transfer rate and seek times.

Higher capacity Zip disks must be used in a drive with at least the same capacity ability. Generally, higher capacity drives also handle all lower capacity media. The 750 MB drive, however, cannot write to the 100 MB media, which is the cheapest and most common.

Zip media is similar in vertical size (but thicker) than 3.5" floppy disks, which means the drive slot is large enough to accept such a floppy. To prevent drive and disk damage, the underside of Zip media cases include a retroreflectiveA retroreflector is a device that sends light or other radiation back where it came from regardless of the angle of incidence, unlike a mirror, which does that only if the mirror is exactly perpendicular to the light beam. This effect can be commonly obta spot in one corner. The drive mechanism will not engage if the reflective spot is not detected.

Unlike other diskette formats, the Zip's write protectionWrite protection (also known as record protection) is a mechanism that prevents erasure of valuable data by the accidental recording or storing of new data. The mechanism may be a switch, a sliding tab, a removable ring or a break-away tab. Data is protec is implemented on the software level.

The Zip system also introduced media accessIn security, the term access control refers first to the practice of restricting entrance to a facility or property to authorized persons, and secondly to the mechanisms which keep track of entries (i. visitor's logs, security cameras or prevent access by protection via a passwordFor information on the game Password see Password game. A password is a form of authentication which uses secret data to control access to a resource. The password is kept secret from those not allowed access, and those wishing to gain access are tested o. Like write protection, this was also implemented on the software level. One side effect of this implementation was that, on some drive models, it was possible to trick the software into allowing access to a different disk than it had believed was in the drive, thereby bypassing the password protection.

The Zip's popularity started to fade around 2000This page is about the year 2000. See 2000 AD for the UK comic book, Number 2000 for other uses. 2000 is a leap year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar), and also the International Year for a Culture of Peace''. Events Y2K passes without the seri. By this time, numerous people had reliability problems with their Zip drives (especially the click of deathThe click of death is a failure mode typical of Iomega Zip drives. The term is also used more broadly to refer to failures of several other kinds of disk storage systems. In all cases, the click of death is characterized by a noticeable clicking or buzzin), and the relatively high cost per megabyte of the proprietarySomething proprietary is something exclusively owned by someone, often with connotations that it is exclusive and cannot be used by other parties without negotiations. It may specifically mean that something is covered by one or more patents, as in propri cartridges was becoming unattractive, compared to the falling costs of CD-R and DVD±RW technology.

The Zip disks' suppliers include: Iomega, Fujifilm, Verbatim and Maxell.

Iomega also produced an early line of external recordable CD drives using the Zip brand in the late 1990s, called the ZipCD 650. It used regular CD-R media and had no format relation to the magnetic Zip drive.

See also: Jaz drive, Iomega REV and Bernoulli drive.