Ask Lemmy

Zip drives were a must have for graphic design students in its heyday. They were relatively affordable (around $150 USD for the drive, $10 per disk iirc) and had a capacity of 100 Megabytes per disk, which was sorta shitty for removable storage even then but good enough for design project assets. There was little else commercially available at the time that was affordable and allowed you to easily port files between home/work/school, so they were everywhere in certain circles in the late 90s, particularly in design.

They were flimsy and unfortunately kinda unreliable, though, so if you heard the dreaded "click of death," it meant your disk was hosed. They eventually started selling 250 MB drives, and I remember there was the "Jaz" drive whose disks could hold 1 GB, but by then I think people were just done with Iomega's shit. I didn't know anyone that owned a frickin Jaz drive. When USB thumb drives became a thing around the turn of the millennium, Zip drives pretty much disappeared overnight. Good fuckin riddance, they sucked.

Yep. I've used 5 1/4s, 3.5s, Zip, CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVDs, DVD-Rs, DVD-RWs, BD, BD-R, BD-RW, Thumb/Flash, SD, Micro SD, and CF. The only one I can think of that I never personally used were Tapes, but I know people who did. They kind of came and went in a hurry it felt like to me.

When I was in high school, I got a cd burner when they were still somewhat new. Another kid wanted me to burn some mp3s into an audio cd for him, so he lent me his external zip drive loaded up with his mp3.

I feel like zip drives only made sense from around 1995-2000. They filled a gap for writable media at the time.

My dad used to pirate games and software for us off BBSes. I swear, he would download everything he could find and put it on zip drives. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's got a drawer somewhere filled with all the best software 1995 had to offer.

While in audio engineering school we used all sorts of obscure data storage types, zip being one. Most were DAT tapes and digital reels (2-track, 8, 16, and 24+) with quality that would make FLAC lovers jealous, CDs were used but only for our own personal copies. We also used analog reels. We were made to learn the basics first before moving into computer audio. Fun times.

They were gaining popularity in 1996-1998 I think, but starting from 1999 CD writers became affordable, and zip drives disappeared pretty quickly.

Some companies kept them around as backup solutions, but that stopped early in the 2000s as well. I think the zip cartridges disappeared from the market pretty much all at once.

Pretty sure I still have the zip drive. It has a scsi connector, but pretty sure there's a scsi card in there somewhere too. They were only popular for a small slice of time. Just like those mini tape drives with the cartridges that were about the size of a tictac container. I probably have that too.

• most people did the floppy / USB drive path
• but if you were in a field that needed more storage, then it became the floppy / SyQuest / ZIP / USB drive path
  • SyQuest disks (and drives) were a serious pain in the ass, temperamental and flaky as hell …

The sound of the "Click of Death" still haunts me.

We had Jazz drives too, which just failed and caused you to lose a larger amount of data than a zip.

Yeah they were a thing for a brief while. I still have one in a closet. Do you need one?

I still have them, and they still work! I have two drives, one external and one internal zip drive, and probably about 30 or so disks. The real awesome ones which were too expensive for my broke ass back then were the Jaz drives with their crazy 1gb disks.

I had a zip drive, jaz drive and a super disk 120mb 3.5" floppy drive at one point.

My high school didn't have them, but the vocational school where I took extra classes did, as did our family's PC. I thought they were great. This was about 2001-2004ish, flash drives weren't a thing yet, and burning a CD to hold a single word doc or powerpoint or something like that seemed really wasteful.

Sometimes I would put a couple mp3s on a zip drive and bring them to school to listen to while I was working on a project.

I tried them, they never seemed quite reliable enough. We used DAT tapes, CR-ROMs, and then just hard drives. At first hard drives in external enclosures then HD docks with bare drives.

Just found an old USB Zip drive and a bunch of Zip disks in a box. Still works!

That was the path I took, but I remember a few college friends and several professors had a Zip drive, as did many of the computers in the lab. By the time I had the money and the need for something like that, 1Gb flash drives were cheaper.

(UK) my dads office had those for a good few years in the late 90's, 250mb and 500mb. Which I thought was a huge chunk of data. Roll along 2003 and University and we had ... gasp ...1gb thumb drives, at which point I realised I could email myself documents.

I had both the 100M ZIP drives (one internal, one external) as well as the 1G JAZZ drive back in the times. Not work or study, they were mine.

Dont forget jazz drives, superdisks, syquest drives, Bernoulli drives, and cdr/rw, dvd+/-r, dvd-ram and tape drives!

I bought them and my future-stepfather bought them around the same time. I was using them mostly for backups IIRC (I've forgotten in the intervening ~25 years). Stepfather definitely was using them for backups.

Zip drives were sadly before my time, but I actually managed to find one in the wild! A parallel port drive in clear blue plastic for $40 at a local used media shop. Just the loose drive and cable, no box or anything. Prooooobably a touch too pricey for a device that wouldn't surprise me if it had the click of death.

Honestly I do kinda miss magnetic media like that! Having a big cartridge with moving parts ya shove into a slot just felt so nice when we used floppies as a very young kid.

Yeah i worked for a company that did industrial control systems. We had a zip drive with us whenever we were in the field with all the utils for troubleshooting the equipment. It was so much better that having to lug around a desktop pc.

Yeah, but they were rarely used. Pretty much went straight from floppies to burning CDs at my house.

I had a zip drive. Eventually it got the click of death though. First PC had 5 1/4 and 3.5in drives.

I knew people who had them when I was in highschool, but I never really used them until I started college in 99. They went out of favor after USB flash drives became cheaper shortly after that. I guess I only really got to use zip disks for like a year and a half lol

I was in college and working in a student computer lab at the height of zipdrives. There was a gap where floppies were way too small, CD writers were either molasses slow or not in a public university's budget, and USB was uncommon. SCSI was "da bomb!" in the parlance of the time.

Zip disks were one of the main avenues of piracy between students.