Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

In a market that evolves as quickly as this one, it’s interesting to realize how many interesting inventions have been lost to time over the years, many of which we may never even have heard of. Today, removable storage is all about USB drives or external SSDs and HDDs (which also connect to a computer via USB), but most will remember DVDs, CDs, and even floppy disks.

But some formats fell through the cracks when it comes to the history of storage media, and Zip drives are one of the most interesting ones. Initially pegged as a huge breakthrough for portable storage, it seemed like Zip drives had immense potential, yet they failed to gain enough market presence to sustain its parent company into the future. Let’s take a brief look at what Zip Drives were and why they eventually disappeared.

A 90s revolution

Zip drives were a huge step forward

Image credit: Yuri Litvinenko / 30pin

In the early to mid-90s, portable storage was mostly defined by the standard three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk, which even a “young’un” like me has had experience with. This format had pretty big downsides leading into the turn of the century, though. Floppy disks had a mere capacity of 1.44MB, which would soon become absolutely tiny for the increasingly large pieces of software that would come about. Floppy disks also felt quite fragile, and while we got “superfloppy” formats that were physically larger and had more capacity, those were pretty unwieldy as portable storage.

Enter 1994, when a company called Iomega introduced its variant of a “superfloppy”, the Zip drive. In terms of physical size, Zip disks were only slightly larger than a typical floppy, yet the initial capacity introduced in 1994 reached a whopping 100MB, which was huge number when put up against the traditional floppy disk.

Zip drives also had major performance benefits, with read speeds that could average 1.4MB/s, as opposed to the comparatively sluggish 16kB/s speeds of a traditional floppy disk, as well as a seek time of around 28ms seconds, whereas a floppy disk averaged 200ms. Zip drives weren’t quite as fast as desktop HDDs, but for portable storage, this was a huge step forward.

Early, but brief, success

Zip drives caught on, but not for too long

Image credit: Obijuan83 (RetroWorld.gr)

With such major innovations in capacity and speed, and without the downsides of many other formats at the time, Zip drives managed to become the most popular of the “superfloppy” formats, and they continued to evolve relatively quickly. A few years later, in 1998, Iomega introduced the Zip 250 disks, which increased the capacity to 250MB, and, already in the new millennium, we got the Zip 750, which took that further to 750MB.

Plus, Zip drives were very cheap for what they were offering. A Zip drive (as in, the hardware for reading the disks) initially sold for $200 including a 100MB disk, and each new disk would cost $20, which made relatively high capacities much more attainable. Even a desktop hard drive would often run you $200 for 500MB, so Zip drives were a logical solution for moving data around or backing it up. And things only got cheaper once more manufacturers started to produce the disks.

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It was an appealing enough proposition that big computer manufacturers like Dell started including a Zip drive in some of their PCs. Even Apple included Zip drives in some of its Power Macintosh models from the mid-to-late 90s.

However, things started to shift towards the end of the decade as other portable formats rose to prominence, most notably CDs and USB flash drives.

The big problem with Zip drives

Reliability was an issue

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Despite their initial success, it didn’t take long for users to start noticing a major drawback of Zip drives: many times, they would just fail. It wasn’t necessarily related to age or any particular misuse of the disks, it just happened. It was a big enough phenomenon that it became known as the “click of death”, and once it happened, your drive was gone.

The problem was estimated by Iomega to affect around 0.5% of Zip drives, but while that sounds like a small number, when you sell products by the thousands, it becomes fairly widespread. It was a big enough issue that, in September 1998, a class action lawsuit was filed against Iomega for the common problems. Some of the complaints in that lawsuit were eventually dismissed by the court of Delaware, but others were not, and once the public became aware of the problems with Zip drives, it was hard for the brand to make a comeback.

It didn’t help that this happened around the same time as formats such as CDs were becoming more popular. CDs could store around 700MB of data and they were far cheaper to produce, which made them much more appealing not only for consumers wanting to save their own data, but for companies distributing software, since it massively cut down costs.

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And eventually, USB flash drives became the most popular way to carry data around since they were smaller and offered much faster speeds; USB 1.1 had speeds that generally matched a Zip drive, but USB 2.0 appeared very soon after (in 2002) and increased those speeds by a factor of 20. There was simply no way magnetic drives like the Zip disks could compete.

The Zip legacy

Iomega tried to keep the name alive

During its time in the spotlight, the Zip drive still managed to create enough of a legacy for it to be widely adopted. There were Zip drives available with all kinds of interfaces, whether they were internal or external, and as late as 2014, some aviation companies were still using Zip drives to distribute updates for navigation databases.

Iomega also tried to leverage the Zip name even as it was forced to embrace other technologies. The company eventually started making CD drives under the name ZipCD, despite having no relation to the Zip disks in terms of technology. There was also the PocketZip format, initially called Clik!, a smaller floppy disk storage medium introduced in 1999, which was meant to be more portable and used by portable devices like MP3 players, though this format was even more short-lived than Zip drives themselves.

Eventually, after seeing its profits plummet by the mid-2000s, Iomega was sold to a company called EMC in 2008, and in 2013, EMC and Lenovo formed a joint venture that took over Iomega’s business and removed all of the Iomega branding from its products. It was a major fall from grace for a company that invented multiple interesting products, including both the Zip drive and the earlier Bernouli Box, but it’s easy to see how the Zip drive’s problems led to the company’s downfall.

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