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For a great number of years the floppy disk dominated the information backup market place for the property user as they presented budget friendly information storage. Ok working with floppies was akward, slow and hugely unreliable but at the time it was all we had. Then along came the Zip drive and the planet of data backup changed overnight thanks to the creator of the Zip drive - Iomega. No longer have been you restricted to a paltry 1.4MB of disk storage - now you could match 100MB on one single Zip disk. Later this elevated to, a then, massive 750MB of storage space which was absolutely unheard of at the time.

Zip drives worked in nearly precisely the same way as a floppy disk except they have been physically larger and offered a significantly greater data transfer rate than residence users had ever noticed before in an "external" data storage device. The most significant concern with Zip drives is that although they have been equivalent to floppy disks you nevertheless required a separate Zip drive to study or write to these disks which in turn meant additional expense for residence customers. Also there was a rival technologies referred to as the LS-120 or SuperDisk that found favour with a great deal of computer system suppliers (ironically sufficient the Zip drive extended outlived the LS-120 in terms of recognition and usefulness) so the Zip drive faced an uphill struggle from it's introduction to an eager computer system marketplace.

The Zip drive was/is attainable in a few numerous flavors. There were parallel, SCSI, USB and IDE Zip drives accessible on the marketplace at 1 stage. This meant that regardles of what kind of computer system you had you'd be able to get a Zip drive with a compatible interface. This meant that each Mac and Pc users tended to really like the Zip drive while most Mac users tended to favor the Zips bigger SCSI brother - the Jaz drive... that even so is the topic for a further post for a further day. ftp sites

Alas for all their ingenuity the Zip drive has turn into all but obsolete. The existing development in hard drive storage capacities has meant that any storage device supplying less than 10GB - 20GB of storage space is all but ignored as a useful backup device. Any laptop user reading this who has ever owned a Zip drive will likely really feel the similar sense of nostalgia I felt when writing it. The Zip drive was extremely revolutionary in it's day and paved the way for a true boom in information backup technology for properties and tiny businesses. RIP Zip drive.... you shall be missed.