The introduction of the 100 megabyte disk quickly made Zip a success and people used them to store files larger than the 1.44 MB capacity of regular floppy disks. Plans were considered for a lower cost 25 MB version that would work in the same 100 MB drive - the idea being to bring the price of a Zip disk closer to that of an ordinary floppy - but these disks were never released. The initial Zip system was introduced with a capacity of 100 megabytes. Eventually, USB Zip drives came to be powered from their USB connections. The Zip Plus drive included additional software and a smaller power adapter than the original Zip drives. For a while, there was a drive called the Zip Plus which was supposed to be able to autodetect between parallel and SCSI, but there were lots of compatibility problems reported and the drive was later dropped. External drives have been made with parallel port and SCSI and (some years later) USB interfaces. Internal drives have been made with ATA and SCSI interfaces. Zip drives have been made with a variety of interfaces to the computer. The rivalry was over before the dawn of the USB era. Today's average 7200 RPM desktop hard drives have average seek times of around 8.5–9 ms.Įarly generation Zip drives were in direct competition with the SuperDisk or LS-120 drives, which held 20% more data and could also read standard 3½" 1.44 MB diskettes, but they had a lower data transfer rate due to lower rotational speed. 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 1.44 MB floppy's 500 kbit/s (62.5 kB/s) transfer rate and several-hundred millisecond average seek time. This resulted in a disk that has all of the 9 cm (3½") floppy's convenience, but holds much more data, with performance that is much quicker than a standard floppy drive (though not directly competitive with hard drives). The Zip disk uses smaller media (about the size of a 9 cm (3½") microfloppy, rather than the Compact Disc-sized Bernoulli media), and a simplified drive design that reduced its overall cost. The Zip system is 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 brand was also used for internal and external CD writers known as Zip-650 or Zip-CD. It has been quickly superseded by flash drive systems as well as rewritable CDs and DVDs, and is practically not in use anymore. The format became the most popular of the super-floppy type products but never reached the status of a quasi-standard to replace the 3.5-inch floppy disk. Originally it had a capacity of 100 MB, but later versions increased this to first 250 MB and then 750 MB. The Zip drive is a medium-capacity removable disk storage system, introduced by Iomega in late 1994.
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