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.
But seriously, thanks for all the information.
