Davis Goertzen

I have heard somewhere that Zip drives can actually write and read ordinary 3 1/2" floppy disks, the reason being that the only difference between a floppy disk and a Zip disk is the quality of the magnetic coating; Zip disks have a higher quality coating, so the read/write head can write things much smaller. Is this so? Just wondering if an internal Zip drive would basically be able to do all the things a floppy disk drive could, plus deal with Zip disks of course.

PC eye

Zip drive
In 1994, Iomega introduced the Zip drive. Not true to the 3½-inch form factor, hence not compatible with the standard 1.44 MB floppies (which may have actually been a good thing for the drives as it removed a big potential source of problems), it became the most popular of the "super floppies". It boasted 100 MB, later 250 MB, and then 750 MB of storage and came to market at just the right time, with Zip drives gaining in popularity for several years. It never reached the same market penetration as floppy drives, as only a few new computers were sold with Zip drives. Eventually the falling prices of CD-R and CD-RW media and flash drives, and notorious hardware failures (the so-called "click of death") reduced the popularity of the the Zip drive.
A major reason for the failure of the Zip Drives is also attributed to the higher pricing they carried. However hardware vendors such as Hewlett Packard, Dell and Compaq had promoted the same at a very high level. Zip drive media was primarily popular for the excellent storage density and drive speed they carried, but was always overshadowed by the price.

[edit] LS-120

Announced in 1995, the "SuperDisk" drive, often seen with the brand names Matsushita (Panasonic) and Imation, had an initial capacity of 120 MB (120.375 MiB[36]) using even higher density "LS-120" disks.
It was upgraded ("LS-240") to 240 MB (240.75 MiB). Not only could the drive read and write 1440 kB disks, but the last versions of the drives could write 32 MB onto a normal 1440 kB disk (see note below). Unfortunately, popular opinion held the Super Disk disks to be quite unreliable, though no more so than the Zip drives and SyQuest Technology offerings of the same period and there were also many reported problems moving standard floppies between LS-120 drives and normal floppy drives. This again, true or otherwise, crippled adoption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Zip_drive

Some of the last models made had floppy capability for reading and writing to the long standing 3 1/2" floppy. But the ease and popularity with optical writers(cd/dvd burners) saw that come to a fast end. You can burn bootabled cds that hold 700mb of data. As you can see from the descriptions how some zip drives could compress 32mb onto a standard 1.44mb floppy they soon became obsolete. You could use zip disks for making startup disks that hold more upto 250mb. But for practical application at this time they simply don't make the grade.

Davis Goertzen

What you are trying to say in the fewest words possible is that no, Zip drives don't work with 3 1/2" floppy disks. Right? But seriously, thanks for all the information.

Davis

apj101

yeah what pc_eye is trying to say is that he doesnt know and cant pick the answer out of the mass of wikilinks

These are techincally 2 types of of zip:
1 - The zip drive (this is the one invented by Iomega, and is aways refered to as a ZIP drive) - It is not compatible with floppies, in fact they wont even fit
2 - The LS120 drive, this was basically a better version of the 3 1/2 floppy, the disks were the same size but held more data. SOME of these drives are compatible with the 1.44mb 3 1/2 floppies

either way both dont have too much application these days and dvd-rw and cd-rw have made data storage limits somewhat less of an issue

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The_Other_One

Short answer, zip disks and 3.5" floppies are two totally different formats No, you can not use 3.5" disks in a zip drive.

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PC eye

Are you aware that there were 2.88mb floppy drives that also didn't last? As you can see from the information there different types came out and now are rather outdated. The prices on optical drives and blank media made them obsolete in no time.

"Raising the ante on high-capacity floppies; next step: 2.88MB or floptical drives? (News Analysis) (column)
Source: MacWEEK
Publication Date: 13-AUG-91" Those ended in the obsolete catagory as well.

DCIScouts

Ok, but that's not what the user was really asking. A simpler answer probably would have been better, but thank you for the extra information PC Eye. Thread closed.

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