The Iomega Zip Drive: Exploring The Unsung Hero of 90's Data Storage

[@gavinburnett5641]

I used a zip drive heavily in my first job as a IT technician. One disk could store the install files for windows 95, and all the drivers for the varying PC hardware on site. Since most of the PCs did not have CD roms, but all had parallell ports, the zip drive made reinstalling windows 95 (which I had to do a lot) very easy.

[@jajabinx35]

I have a vague memory of a certain 'jazz drive' also... Anyone remember this also?

[@danyoutube7491]

@@jajabinx35 Never owned any of these large removeable storage devices but yes, I remember the name from magazines.

[@BillAnt]

I was a Jaz guy with 1GB cartridges using for graphics work. They all went bad with the "click of death". lol

[@005AGIMA]

Very cool stuff Dan. NO way was the Zip a failed format. It just had a niche. Anyone in Graphic design loved them. Even when CD-Rs came out, they were £10 per disk with a 25% failure rate depending on your writer and the machine it was plugged in to. The zip was much more reliable by contrast, and reusable. I had no idea that it would work on an Amiga. Didn't even consider it. I may have to get one :D Loved your Story about writing a story based on Another World. I did the same thing funny enough. I wrote a story for English, on my Amiga, but mine was based on Mercenary. Was the longest and most detailed piece I'd ever submitted lol. Great video as always mate. Always look forward to your work. Keep it up.

[@DjM3ss]

Zip drives where a revolution... apart from the dreadful click of death. I still remember thinking why wasnt it replacing the old 1.44 mb floppy drives... then i got my first cd burner which eventualy ended up as better way to store big chunks of data at the time.

[@Error42_]

I had one of these during my uni days. I would download as much as I could over a weekend from time to time on the lab computers (internet was dial-up then if you even had it). A friend and I did this so many times. I used an old camera bag to carry the drive, PSU cables and a bunch of disks. Happy days 🙂 EDIT: Also used to download websites too with web crawler software too. I will still have some somewhere. Of course another option was to have a per-prepared folder of games and tools to share files over the network in order to set some computers up in the lab to "research" Doom, Quake and Shadow Warrior 😉 Also moved on to CD's in the end myself, the zip drive was still useful for getting data though even with the writer. But the writer was great for long term storage of those download runs.

It's very interesting to hear from someone, who actually used these devices. I remember reading articles in some Polish Amiga magazine about ZIP Drive, but never could afford one. But I remember carrying parts of the Internet on 720kb (pc format) discs and reading them on my Amiga 1200 :) I would love to see how ZIP drive worked in Amiga environment!

[@ChrisFranklyn]

Oh man, a Zip drive was something I could only dream of owning back then.

[@tonybossaller4074]

Oh the Click of Death was very common. The trouble was that once a disk went full on CoD, it would “infect” any drive you used it in, slowly degrading that drive. So the more you “shared” drives and disks, the more likely your system would succumb. I have had five drive and three of them had it. Two internal IDEs, one parallel external (got it fixed by Iomega under warranty twice) and one scsi drive. But I do believe it was an issue primarily on the older 100Meg models. The 250 and 750 models had disks fail and click but it didn’t spread.

[@philscomputerlab]

I bought a parallel port ZIP drive back in the day and it was so useful! I would ride my bike to friends, but also sneak into the computer lab at our university because of exploring the Internet. With friends, we would swap games on DOS computers. I needed a DOS driver on floppy disk, but once loaded you could backup entire games collections. From the early Internet I was getting emulators, think DOS version of MAME and emulators for R-Type and other games :D

[@Xmaster1990]

I always loved and still love the eject sound of the drive. It sound very heavy and mechanically still have a working drive in one of our PCs today

[@idmooseman]

I loved my little ZIP drive, in fact, I still have it. Used it quite a bit when working, (I'm retired now), and still have it packed away and stored in the garage.

[@vimster]

Did an art degree in the late 90s and everyone had Zip discs to save digital work on. The Macs in the illustration suite all had Zip drives. It filled a gap at the time before USB sticks caught on in the 2000s.

[@fooflyz]

Ah yea, G4's with the built in drives that always jammed.

[@6581punk]

I bought one as soon as I saw them. I was using an A1200 with an 80mb hard disk and adding the Zip would mean 100mb extra. I used to boot Mac OS with Shapeshifter off a Zip, they were pretty reliable. I think I only ever had one disk go bad.

[@thromboid]

Ah, I did the same - it was great to be able to fit a bootable Mac OS installation plus a bunch of applications and utilities onto a removable disk for use with ShapeShifter, and it was fast enough to be usable.

[@thanhmcgriff3387]

Great job Dan as always. Zip drives were a massive leap in storage for the price, a game changer in being able to carry a lot of info without breaking the bank. We wouldn’t be where we are now without the bridge they built.

[@Dinnye01]

2 Dan Wood videos in a week! A real treat ❤

[@ondrejsedlak4935]

Used my 1st gen SCSI Zip drive until about 2005 when USB flash drives became more common. On the Amiga, I used it solely as a hard drive with one disk for games, and one disk for productivity stuff. I only ever bought one extra disk for university work. Bless this unsightly blue monstrosity.

[@boydpukalo8980]

I bought a parallel port Zip drive and leather carrying case when it came out mid-1990's while in college. It was a staggering success and quite popular. I also downloaded on the campus computer labs high speed network and brought disks back to my own computer with pokey dial up. It was a massive improvement over spanning files over multiple floppies. I upgraded to external Jaz when it came out and added the companies SCSI controller to my Dell, while the campus engineering workstations (NT & Unix) had built in SCSI. Never had a problem. 2 years ago I started collecting Zip 100/250/750 Parallel/SCSI/USB/1394 drives, Click USB drives, Syquest SCSI drives, Castlewood SCSI/USB drives, and LS120/LS240 USB/SCSI drives. Nostalgia. Super video. Bring back good times, simpler times.

[@kostasjezuz4846]

It was the other way round for me, I first had a (very expensive) 2x speed Phillips CD-recorder on my Pentium-1 at home, then went to uni where every PC boasted a Zip-drive and had to buy a Zip-drive and carry Zip-disks around for uni stuff, and also to carry home all the cool stuff I downloaded from the ultra-fast internet connection at the uni library.

[@soundguydon]

Bought my Zip drive in '96 at college & loved it. It was amazing -- 100 whole megs on just 1 disk?! ;) I had a clunky PC at the time & got the parallel port version. Fortunately for me a friend needed the portability of the one I got & traded his IDE internal for my external one. I used it until the early 2000s. Never developed the click of death & never had a problem with mine. I wish I still had it around, but I sold it and all the disks a loooong time ago.

[@pwissink1]

I still have 2 of those Zip drives. Both working fine after 25 years. I even have some sealed disks as well. I use them on my Xp pc and Win98 Compaq lte laptop nowadays. Back then I was the only one in my friends group who had one. So media exchange was still done on HD floppies🤓

[@Faceplant-hl5yn]

In the early 90's a mate lend me his zip drive with disks full of software.. good times. I recently bought one myself for retro project purposes. It's still a load of fun!

[@kontraen]

Used Zip Drives and disks a lot from almost their introduction to around 2002 or 2003 when USB Sticks started to operate in the same price range. Had an internal IDE version in my PC at home and a parallel port external one to take with me to university or use it on my laptop - and as you have said, I absolutely don't think of it as a failed storage system. They are/were very reliant and opened up loads of possibilites in data exchange for an affordable price, especially for school kids and students.

[@kevinwestrom4775]

I used & loved the Zip drive back in the mid to late 90s. It stored so much more than the original floppy disks,.. it wasn't as much as the Iomega Jazz drive, but decent for normal text files, and smaller jpeg photo files.

[@aaroncheah2088]

Very lucky. Both my Zip 100 drives died due to click of death. Even in the used market, many also suffered the same symptoms.

[@Meglivorn]

We had zip100 drives at work in the mid 90s. I get one internal IDE drive for home, so I could trasfer stuff from and to work (that time I didn't have a CD writer or internet at home until 1999-2000) Last year I found the drive and the disks, sadly my USB-IDE adapter that works just fine with HDDs wasn't able to connect the zip-drive but whan I dug out an old core2 machine with IDE i could check them. All the disks still works just fine. It was a great device carrying data around.

[@batlin]

I was still using an Atari ST when these came out, and by the time I moved to PCs around 1998, the CD seemed to be the way forward. But I always absolutely loved the look of the ZIP disks -- there was something uniquely mid-1990s about it that reminded me of films like "Hackers". I'd like to get a hold of one now for my Ataris and Archimedes.

[@londongaz2]

Yeah, loved my zip drive! Remember being super impressed with it at the time, and it did look really cool on the desk

[@jcw1569]

Oh the click of death was very real. I have several disks that click randomly while in use. 8 out of the 50 Macs in my high school had scsi zip drives. They were trashed by other students and at least two drives would permanently kill any disk inserted. I have piles of zip100s zip250s and a couple of zip750s and at least one of each drive.

[@PaulGates-po4uq]

Still got a few of these. IDE, SCSI hooked up to 90s rack mounted music kit and one in my Amiga Tower. They were amazing when they came out, I used to go to an Internet cafe and fill it up with Aminet downloads in Manchester. Never had one disk fail

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

One of the coolest devices of the 90s. The translucent USB model was awesome. I was tech lead on a storage software product and customers used to try to RAID Zip drives together.

[@robwebnoid5763]

I still have my Zip100 drive, external parallel port version, bought in the mid 1990's. I only bought around 10 disks, so I still have all of that too. I just had to make sure I set my PC parallel port speed to EPP/ECP for fastest throughput. The good thing is that I bought my drive in the mid 1990's instead of the late 1990's because that is when the Click of Death began. As the Zip drive became viral & popularly trended, more people demanded it & thus for Iomega to get their maximum potential profits from this high demand from consumers, they had to make shortcuts in quality control to roll them down the assembly line faster. Thus the death click. I bypassed all of that by luckily getting the early batches a few years prior when the Zip was just starting & there was not much demand yet. As Ben Franklin once said, "Haste makes waste". The Click of Death is a primary testimony & proof of that quotation. Over 25 years later I still have all of that Zip stuff, along with a piggy-back "Zip Unleashed!" battery backup, bought at Fry's Electronics (RIP), which I am currently repairing (dead Ni-Cd batteries). I had also found & bought for cheap an internal IDE version of the Zip100 about 10 years ago at Goodwill. The speed comparison between the parallel port & IDE version is like night & day, as the IDE version is like 50-100 times faster, as an eyeball guess. I never got into Iomega's later products, such as the Zip250 & Jaz drives, because as aforementioned in the video, the writable & rewritable CD/DVD became more practical & cheaper, of which I still use today, even these days when optical discs are being touted as getting more obsolete. I also still have all my Commodore 8-bit C-64 stuff, including 2 Datasettes, plus all my floppy disks, manuals, magazines, etc. And as also seen in the video, my browser of choice over 2 decades ago was Netscape Navigator. In a way, Netscape still exists today, in the form of Mozilla. And the modern browser that still is getting used & updated today that looks exactly like Navigator, is Mozilla Seamonkey, which I also use. But I do miss the Y2k era, browsing the Internet on 56k dialup on Netscape browser, because it's not just that technology that I miss, but also my youth.

[@remka2000]

I remember using these before CD-R were a thing. Super convenient to bring software to LAN parties to share. Then came the first CD writers (1x first, and they were expensive, so not too many of my friends had one 😂), and the ZIP drive sat somewhere in a cupboard to take dust…

[@CarsandCats]

That's what I did as well. CD-R could hold 8x what a ZIP 100 could and was so much cheaper!

[@remka2000]

@@CarsandCats these were the days :)

[@davesharp7315]

We used to "sneak" a ZIP drive into college and plug in via parallel port and DOS drivers, very handy...

exactly the same way i used ZIP Drive ! at university we had paralel port version and me in my student home had scsi version on amiga. so i spend as much time as possible to download at university and watch at home. great memories. spiv/infect (Amiga Demoscene)

[@joelinherts]

I loved my SCSI Zip drive. It’s been lying in a drawer for 20 years but I don’t want to take it to the dump, it’s been too faithful a servant and doesn’t deserve such a brutal ending.

[@mccrh7737]

Love the Zip drive, used it from about 96 - 2008 or so :) The Zip 100 is a techs best friend for older computers :)

[@saintuk70]

The Iomega Zip Drive was a great bit of kit, had an external and internal version back in the day. Really was an alternative to burning cds for smaller amounts of data.

[@philford1730]

I ha d a zip drive back in the day as well. Very handy at the time as i traveled to client sites every week so having an easy way to back up files with mobile was very helpful. Have no idea where it is now..

[@altronixvideo]

yeah I was a zip fan. Was using them at work in the mid 90s at a film and tv production company. There was also the Jaz disc that came later with 1GB capacity

[@arlandakhartan]

Great video and brought back some memories! We used these mainly at work to back up files for accounts and to transfer large graphics files. One of the advantages the Zip Drive had was that it was re-writable AND reliable with a robust case. Using CDs in this way always felt a bit wasteful if they were single write and of course, they could be damaged easily.

[@BikepackingAdventures]

It's 2023 and that still looks well designed, functionality and stylish.

[@wormwoodroadshow]

Wasn't expecting a new video this fast. Great to see you uploading again.

[@onlineamiga]

Would have been great to see the ZIP Drive working on the Amiga. I had an IDE one on mine running with IDEFIX97 and it worked great (until the click of death). Being able to carry 100mb around and it would load fast as well was just epic. I too did my homework on Wordsworth on the Amiga and then imported into college PCs running Word 95. But I actually saved my work as rich text format rather than plain text and it usually maintained the text formatting bold etc. Also you unlocked a memory where you wrote your English homework based on Another World! I did exactly the same thing but with Syndicate! My English teacher also had no idea what a puersadatron was or a gauss gun etc so totally got away with stealing some creativity haha!

[@shadowtheimpure]

I loved ZIP back in the day. It was so much nicer than having to transport a small stack of floppies.

[@cpace123]

So I had family that worked at iomega. I lived in a town where the main head quarters was. I never got any free, bees but where I worked was only about 3 miles away. So buildings are still there too this day. That seems so long ago.

[@Angus576]

I loved it. Had internal and external unit. I have a ton of new old stock internals in my basement.

[@MrPDawes]

I had these for my Acorn RiscPC and Archimedes and internal ones for my PC allowing me to transfer large files easily between them. This wasn't a failed format, just became redundant when large USB drives became available for most, but since my RiscPC and Archimedes didn't have USB, these disks were still very useful. Never had one fail but I was always worried about storing critical data on such media.

[@BollingHolt]

These things really come in handy when tinkering with 80s/early 90s Macs!

[@agranero6]

I loved my Zip drive I got a special bag made only for it and a few disks. I got it everywhere. 100Mb can seem tiny today but it was huge back then. Mine used the parallel port. And no never anyone of them failed.

[@stephanszarafinski9001]

After the anouncement, iomega pushed the date forward and forward, but finally I got the scsi version at release date. It was amazing, blue, fast, great stuff. Loved it, until the click of death… I still got it and recently copied all the disks to images using a zuluscsi. Great video, thanks 😊

[@nneeerrrd]

Thank you for sharing your memories! Those were the days!

[@MegaManNeo]

I was still a kid during the 90's and young teen during earlier years of the 2000's but whenever I saw my math teacher - who also happened to teach computer science at my school of the time - grabbing this exact Zip drive I always wanted to have one myself. Call it nostalgia but to have data on cartridges (as in GameBoy) or diskettes still feels really cool to me to transport data. Granted, these days everything is connected through this weird thing they call the Internet (a sentence actually not that ironic considering there are many more layers to the world wide web than just to browse websites and watch cat videos) but I can't deny the feeling of coping data using this physical media is still fascinating. By the way, Dan, love your podcast!

[@jamezxh]

Back in the day I had a Laser-Servo Floppy Disk drive. I still have it and some Media stored away in the shed.

[@GameInterest]

I've got a parallel Zip drive and USB Zip drive on top of my Athlon 64. No internal drive though. Great video covering these!

[@richardwheeldon8889]

I remember connecting one of these to the SCSI port on the back of my A590 - it had 5x the capacity and 6x the speed of the hard drive itself.

[@Zimbob2424]

I remember this well I had the external, then I put in an internal one, after that one, which I liked the most, was the 1gb version, It is the Iomega JAZ 1GB, Not sure if I still have that is some boxes , I know the pc is gone with the internal drive. All I have left from those days is my commadore 64 and amiga 500. brings back a lot of memories. From the sounds of it I got 10 yrs on you, I was a teenager in 86

[@MichaelOglesby]

Hi Dan, The Iomega Zip drive got me through University, a lifesaver. It is 1995, and doing graphic design, I soon realised the humble 1.4MB floppy wouldn't cut it as I worked on 20-30MB PhotoShop files. University did provide SyQuest drives, but these had a reputation for being highly unreliable. The Iomega ZIP had been on the market for less than a year, and it was getting glowing reviews in the tech magazines, also, the discs held more data than SyQuests. So, a few of us purchase a ZIP drive. At the time, there were only two models: Parallel and SCSI. As I had a Macintosh, I went with SCSI. Naturally, we were blown away by the speed and capacity of the ZIP drive. In the five-plus years of using ZIP, I think I had one failure. I feel the reputation of the unreliability of the ZIP drive is unjustified. Now, the Iomega Jaz on the other hand... awful reliability. I stopped using ZIP in favour of CD-Rs etc, later, DVD-Rs. Internal ZIP drives first appeared in the Power Macintosh 6400 model, in 1996. Once Apple started to include internal ZIP drives, we knew we made the right choice to back the format.

[@AndersEngerJensen]

Haha! I stole the story for Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis for our essay work in high school. I got a B. The teacher said it was very creative, but a bit too long. 😂😂😂

[@AJOngenae]

I always wanted a ZIP drive. I have a more "modern" take on them now... I installed a hard drive bay on the front of my tower and use SSDs as removable storage

[@tonybkent]

I got one of the first Zip drives and connected it with SCSI to my Amiga 4000. Later I got the follow-up Jaz drive with 1GB capacity. I think both are still up in the loft.

[@boydpukalo8980]

Zip was a smashing success and those writers who call it a failed format/storage type never experienced it when it came out and are instead desk jockeys copying what others have claimed. I lived through it and let me tell you compared to floppy disks, zip was a godsend.

[@cabbitkisser2620]

i have a zip drive in my compaq year's ago. back when window's 98 was out. but now i do bump across a zip drive in thrift store's once in a awhile.

[@bad.sector]

I had an IDE version and that was prone to the click of death! After losing several disks, I stopped using ZIP disks altogether, as they were unsafe to me. And I have the actual backstory what the click of death was and how it was caused: You may remember the click when the media is unlocked and pushed out. That is the heads jumping back to their most extent. Engineers added small foam cussions to dampen the jump back. But iomega at some point was saving production costs - and the engineer responsible for their installment wasn't working for the anymore. So the knowledge of WHY they were there was lost. Now what happens when you quickly bump something as precise as a read/write head into hard metal? It disaligns! And that's what happened there. The heads weren't aligned anymore,. But that's only half of the story - because they might still work when reading: See, the drives had their tracks marked magnetically (as opposed to LS 120 drives with their Laser Servo). So writing any data now will destroy the track markings - and that's what causes the click of death! The drive tries to realign the heads by moving the to the outmost position and in again, so it may find the tracks - but ultimately this must fail, if there are no readable track markers anymore. (Ah yes, now look at my channel's name... but that's just coincidence in this case ;))

[@liamodell7191]

I think I got my external Zip drive back in late 90's and had it for a year before I bought my first CD burner. I ended up selling the drive to my best friend and hadn't seen it since. I was convinced that the Zip disk format (and later the Jazz) format was going to replace the standard 3.5 inch floppies, but then CD burners were becoming faster and more affordable. I'm currently using a Blu-Ray burner for backups.

[@cliffjg]

I started off with one of these with a parallel port and upgraded to an internal IDE version which was much faster. I had an external SCSI version at work. Later at work I added a JAZ SCSI drive. Anyone remember these. They looked very similar but had a green case. The disks were 1GB I think, which seemed massive at the time.

[@RokkitGrrl]

This was like half the storage of my fancy Amiga 500 200MB SCSI HDD. LOL Of course it was a must-have!

[@amigan34]

There were LS120 floppy disk drives as well with 120MB capacity which we have forgotten too.

[@srfrg9707]

The // zip drive was the best of them all.

[@Silanael]

I used one of these with my Pentium 90MHz. Had one disk for digital camera photos, rest were full of various files downloaded from the Internet.

[@fattomandeibu]

Never got a Zip drive, ended up getting a PCMCIA to SCSI card and a CD-ROM so I could switch my Amiga Format subscription to the CD version, since they included pretty much the entire Aminet on the CD every month. I still have those CDs, though the pins on the 1200's PCMCIA socket no longer line up properly. I think the case has warped slightly with the aging of the plastic, as there's no bent pins. I really did want one, but the issue was I had a 1gb hard disk already for storing big files, and no one else owned a Zip either, so it wouldn't've got much, if any, use.

[@JestersDeadUK]

Yes Dan, back with more vids, long overdue Sir!!!

[@HAGSLAB]

You really are back! :D Not sure I can get through another Zip Drive video without finally getting one. We'll see I guess.

[@r66fplaysgames]

I did have a later USB Zip Drive & some Zip disks that did develop the "Click of Death" problem.

[@philsbbs]

great video I run my bbs off a zip drive and still have some of my maxbbs stuff on aminet.

[@WDCallahan]

So many video about this! Where are the videos about my Jaz drive? Why no love for the Jaz drive?

[@danwood_uk]

I'd have loved a Jaz Drive, but too pricey for me as a teenager back then!

[@DanielBull]

A Zip drive without the click of death? Wow now that truely is a rarity 😜 we used to use them where I worked, I spent a lot of time returning drives that had failed under warranty 🙁

[@Foebane72]

I have to stop you there about the Click of Death, Dan: I had that shortly after I got my Zip Drive, and unfortunately, it was not a standalone unit but inside my PC case, so that became useless!

[@IgoByaGo]

I never had a Zip drive. The company my dad worked for gave him a few Jaz drives, so that is what I used. I also had an internal SCSI card and an 8GB Barracuda 10,000 RPM HDD. All hand me downs.

[@FintanMoloney]

I would have been in College around the same time as these were very popular and I would have gotten one myself but I was lucky enough to get an early parallel port CDRW drive. The problem with that though was yes the storage was great but the RW disks were very expensive. Then again I remember only having the one disk for a long time as its all I needed. I seem to remember ZIP drives were very popular with the likes of musicians & graphic design houses and the like also. Totally agree with you there Dan that they were not a failed format at all. Just like I disagree that Minidisk was a failed format which is another statement you often hear. In the right setting certain formats like these were very useful to certain people.

[@TYNEPUNK]

the zip drive still seems exciting. I remember using them as late as 2002 because I was taking them to work at rockstar, then taking them back to use on my amiga :)

[@willrobinson7599]

Another enjoyable video dan .a mate had the 100 meg one and I was well impressed how much u could store on it. I never had one myself

[@leepshin]

I backed the wrong horse back then. I got myself a Sparq drive instead. (remember them, they were the alternative to the Zip drive) I was at college and USB drives were still in their infancy but my college friends were all starting to use them. I wish I'd backed the USB drives instead.

[@dizzyikea]

I had a ripped version of windows 95/8 like tiny11 today running off a zip drive, i thought LS120 had them screwed but no what a surprise. I did get the click of death on maybe 1 or 2 Zips, LS120 almost all got it at some point

[@xevious2501]

Unreliability was a thing for the zip drive but no where near as bad as it were for the syquest drives. Remember the old Syquest drives? 44mb external hard drive media. Basically the cross between a conventional hard drive disk in an external floppy disk like cartridges. Which preceded the zip drive. Succeeded by the likes of the Bernoulli external drives 150mb

[@Galacticadude]

I had a PC (win 98SE?) with an internal Zip drive that was faster than the external drive. Also had an external Zip drive used with my Amiga 3000. I have them all packed away until my daughter moves out and I can get my retro run set up. Hope I don't forget where they are and how to use them. ha ha

[@jcw1569]

I was used to scsi zip drives on Macs and when I used a parallel port zip drive on a Windows machine, I couldn't believe how incredibly slow it was.

[@Bassquake76]

My internal drive version got the dreaded click of death. Killed the disk. Thanks iomega!

[@JamesEzell]

I still have mine in a shoebox along with a bunch of disks. I should really bring them in and see if the disks are still good and what they have on them.

[@MrMaxeemum]

I always wanted one but they were just a little too expensive so I saved a little longer a bought another hard drive instead, I never needed mobility and just needed backup space instead. I think I'm going to get one for my collection though as they were a big part of PC culture back then.

[@rebeccaschade3987]

I used to have a 250MB Zipdrive, parallell port version, that I used in much the same way you mentioned using yours. I'd used it to bring files to and from school. I'd download stuff at school and bring it home. I got rid of it a long time ago now, but I regret doing that, as I had a nice little stack of disks, and only a few years after getting rid of it, I got into retro systems :/

[@CookieRoxette]

Thank you Dan. Another one of your videos which takes me back to when I was probably most happy!

[@robertrada4783]

Zip was essential for my Roland 8 track. SCSI for the win.

[@CarsandCats]

I had a ZIP drive in my first IBM compatible PC, a Hewlett Packard Pentium 3 450. Those ZIP discs were EXPENSIVE and I only bought 3 then quit using them.

[@j7ndominica051]

Maybe $200 for a disk drive is affordable in America with a higher standard of living where teens have their own car. I remember how expensive CD writers were. To use one at school, I had to build relatioship with the manager of the computer class to access her master computer. I've never seen an iomega zip drive. Sony could have made a computer disk drive for the Minidisc. These small disks were near indestructible, as I discovered while touring with a theater. But they were too obsessed with copyright. CD-RW fit the role of data transport quite well. I never had them wear out from use. The burning did take some time, and you couldn't do it as covertly.

[@1ChilledDude]

Interestingly, I was using SyQuest 44 MB cartridge drives before the jump to Zip drives. The allure of the more compact form factor and higher capacity of the Zips instantly grabbed me. But I fell victim to the Iomega curse. Speaking from experience, the dreaded "clicks of death" were certainly not a rumour. I'd lost countless hours of work stored on Zip drives. Their subsequent descendants, the 1 Gig Jaz drives, weren't much of an improvement having the same mechanical failures.

[@TemalCageman]

I went for the LS-120 drive for my A1200T build. :)

[@neilloughran4437]

A great idea and an enormous leap at the time but all I saw and heard fro friends and numerous places (college, IT training companies etc) was the click of death so I am surprised you haven’t experienced that.

[@BilisNegra]

Zip was absolutely no failed format, if some folks say so, it's plain ridiculous. Its competitors were, though, the best known would be LS-120 (SuperDisk), but there are a few others that are a tad more obscure, and I don't recall their names right now.

[@philosoaper]

I had 2 of them.. I bought 1 SCSI and one Paralell .. I used the scsi one at home for "moar speed".. and took the other one with me.. within a year both had suffered the click of RAGE... my rage, specifically.. .. it would have been so nice if only it didn't have that "minor" issue..

[@richallan001]

Ah i miss zip drives. Alas we naver had them at school or colleges i went to in 90s/early 00s. It would have made my life much easier 🤣

[@markjones9109]

Thanks Dan. Your video's and podcast keep my youth alive. Wonderful times.

[@curlierthanthou]

I just found my old ZIP Drive and disks. Hoping to find some digital art and photos from ‘Wayback, but all Mac these days…