For several years the floppy disk dominated the information backup industry for the property user as they supplied affordable data storage. Utilizing floppies had been awkward, slow and very unreliable but in the time it was all we had. Then along came the Zip drive as well as the planet of data backup altered overnight thanks towards the creator with the Zip drive - Iomega. No longer were you restricted to a paltry 1.4MB of disk storage - now you could fit 100MB on one single Zip disk. Later this increased to, a then, substantial 750MB of storage space which was fully unheard of in the time.
Zip drives worked in virtually specifically precisely the same way as a floppy disk except they were physically bigger and provided a much greater information transfer rate than residence users had ever observed before in an "external" data storage device. The biggest problem with Zip drives is that though they have been comparable to floppy disks you still necessary a separate Zip drive to read or write to these disks which in turn meant a lot more expense for residence users. Also there was a rival technology named the LS-120 or SuperDisk that found favour with a lot of computer suppliers (ironically enough the Zip drive long outlived the LS-120 in terms of recognition and usefulness) so the Zip drive faced an uphill struggle from it is introduction to an eager laptop or computer marketplace.
The Zip drive was/is obtainable inside a handful of distinct flavors. There were parallel, SCSI, USB and IDE Zip drives accessible out there at one particular stage. This meant that no matter what type of computer you had you'd be capable of locate a Zip drive with a compatible interface. This meant that each Mac and Computer users tended to really like the Zip drive though most Mac users tended to favor the Zips bigger SCSI brother - the Jaz drive... that nonetheless may be the topic for yet another article for another day.
Alas for all their ingenuity the Zip drive has turn out to be all but obsolete. The latest growth in hard drive storage capacities has meant that any storage device providing much less than 10GB - 20GB of storage space is all but ignored as a helpful backup gadget. Any computer user reading this who has ever owned a Zip drive will possibly feel exactly the same sense of nostalgia I felt when writing it. The Zip drive was extremely revolutionary in it is day and paved the way for an actual boom in information backup technological innovation for houses and tiny businesses. RIP Zip drive.... you shall be missed.
Author Resource:
Iomega Zip drive provided a rugged and reliable form of data backup for many years. If you want to know what a zip drive is and how it works then pay a visit iomegazipdrive.com for more information on Zip drives and all kinds of backup devices.