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Concept
Zip drive
Summary
The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 250 MB, and finally 750 MB.
The format became the most popular of the superfloppy products which filled a niche in the late 1990s portable storage market. However, it was never popular enough to replace the -inch floppy disk. Zip drives fell out of favor for mass portable storage during the early 2000s as CD-RW and USB flash drives became prevalent. The Zip brand later covered internal and external CD writers known as Zip-650 or Zip-CD, despite the dissimilar technology.
The Zip drive is a "superfloppy" disk drive that has all of the -inch floppy drive's convenience, but with much greater capacity options and with performance that is much improved over a standard floppy drive. However, Zip disk housings are similar to but slightly larger than those of 31⁄2-inch floppy disks.
In the Zip drive, the heads fly in a manner similar to a hard disk drive. A linear actuator uses the voice coil actuation technology related to modern hard disk drives. The Zip disk uses smaller media (about the size of a 9 cm (-inch) microfloppy.
The original Zip drive has a maximum data transfer rate of about 1.4 MB/s (comparable to 8× CD-R; although some connection methods are slower, down to approximately 50 kB/s for maximum-compatibility parallel "nibble" mode) and a seek time of 28 ms on average, compared to a standard 1.44 MB floppy's effective ≈16 kB/s and ≈200 ms average seek time. Typical desktop hard disk drives from mid-to-late 1990s revolve at 5,400 rpm and have transfer rates from 3 MB/s to 10 MB/s or more, and average seek times from 20 ms to 14 ms or less.
Early-generation Zip drives were in direct competition with the SuperDisk or LS-120 drives, which hold 20% more data and can also read standard -inch 1.44 MB diskettes, but they have a lower data-transfer rate due to lower rotational speed.
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