Zip drives were supposed to end the floppy era—until one design flaw destroyed everything
Today’s children will never experience the tyranny of the 1.44 MB floppy disk. This format was so traumatic that today the “save” icon in our applications still looks like it, even though no one has used it for several decades.
Yet despite many claimants to the throne, the floppy disk remained relevant until the advent of USB sticks, and remained relevant while read-only CDs were in their heyday. Writable disks and flash memory ended the reign of floppy disks, but it could have happened sooner with the Zip drive. If only this storage technology didn’t have a fatal flaw.
What Zip Drives Were Meant to Be (And Why They Took Off)
It was literally a big deal
I don’t really have fond memories of installing Windows 95 from dozens of floppy disks or video games that came on six or seven floppy disks. Computer data sizes continued, but common floppy disks remained at 1.44 MB, although there were disks of 2.88 MB and even larger that never caught on.
So you have to understand how blown away I was when I opened the pages of my monthly computer magazine and saw an advert for a drive that looked like a floppy disk at first glance, but offered a whopping 100MB of storage! Keep in mind that our family computer had just upgraded from an 80 MB hard drive to one with a few hundred MB of storage, so in comparison these removable drives were huge.
I remember showing the ad to my parents and receiving only mild confusion in return. Having little money, I never had the opportunity to experience Zip drives when they were new.
This might have been a good thing, since these discs were aimed at professional users and media professionals. CD burners were very expensive and you couldn’t rewrite the discs yet, and if you were working with massive images or 3D models you needed space. Zip drives would also get bigger, with 250MB and even 750MB towards the end. The latter size was intended directly for CD-RWs, but as history shows, it didn’t work.
The famous “click of death” and why it happened
Confidence is everything
There are many reasons why the Zip drive never replaced the floppy drive. It was too expensive, not enough people were buying them, so file sharing was a problem, and of course writable and rewritable CDs stole the show as soon as prices came down. However, another significant problem was reliability.
At one point, a Zip drive could start to click because the read/write heads were misaligned. This was the famous “click of death”.
Zip disks have become data traps
Do you feel lucky?
Not only did this mean the drive was broken, but it could also damage the Zip disk, leading to data loss. As if that wasn’t enough, the problem was (very rarely according to Gibson Research) contagious! One drive could damage a disc, which would then damage the next drive it is inserted into.
In 1998 (as reported by CNET), Zip users filed a class-action lawsuit against Iomega:
They claim that the damage that makes computer disks unreadable is caused by pieces of metal getting on the disks and by lubricant that breaks down and builds up on the reading mechanism.
Consider what that meant. Even though Iomega said the problem affected less than half a percent of drives, that meant you didn’t know if the drive you’re about to insert your drive into would destroy it, or if the drive itself was a poison that could kill the drive.
Zip disks were data traps for other reasons as well. As they were magnetic, this meant that the data would not last as long as, for example, optical disk backups. But the bigger worry was that no one would eventually have the hardware to play Zip disks, given that they were proprietary and niche.
Zip drives are the modern archivist’s nightmare
Why don’t we read?
It’s not hard to imagine that there is some interesting data from the 90s trapped on Zip drives that can never be recovered. Photos, software source code, documents, the list goes on. Due to the trigger of death and its contagious nature, any archivist tasked with maintaining a stack of Zip disks could end up destroying either the data or the material (or both), through no fault of their own.
Libraries and large organizations working with archives from the 90s with the intention of keeping them in the cloud or more modern long-term archive formats are going to end up with Zip disks, and they are going to be difficult to manage.
Hard lessons from the Zip drive era
Is history doomed to repeat itself?
Many lessons can be learned from the Zip drive. People trusted it because it was more practical and larger capacity, but these things do not make a medium reliable. So perhaps we are abandoning optical media too quickly. After all, people are only beginning to understand SSD rot.
At the very least, this should give you more incentive to apply the 3-2-1 save rule.
