The Zip Drive — Iomega's 100 MB Bid to Succeed the Floppy

The Zip drive was a removable magnetic-disk storage system that Iomega, of Roy, Utah, announced in 1994 and began shipping in 1995. A cartridge slightly thicker than a 3.5-inch floppy held 100 MB, about seventy times the 1.44 MB of a high-density 3.5-inch floppy of the day. The external drive, with one disk, cost $199, and it became a common way to carry work files too large for floppies. It also became known for a failure called the "click of death", which ended in a class action.

When did it come out? Announced 1994, shipped 1995

The announcement and the first shipments fall in different years. Iomega's annual report of March 1995, as quoted by English Wikipedia, said it expected to start shipping the Zip products it had announced in 1994 in the first half of 1995, and Wikipedia gives the product's sales period as 1995 to 2003. The retro-PC site DOS Days says it was announced in early 1994 and went on sale for $199, and that the first model in shops was the external parallel-port version.

What was new about it

According to DOS Days, under Windows a Zip drive showed up in Explorer just like a floppy drive, so it took almost no effort to start using. More than 2 million units shipped in the first 15 months, far ahead of even Iomega's most optimistic projections.

Several accounts point to price as the reason it spread. Iomega's earlier Bernoulli Box had cost $2,695 for a 10 MB model in 1985 (DOS Days). A Tedium article republished by Vice says that at the late-1990s peak the drives sold for $149 external and $99 internal, and that Dell fitted them as standard on its machines. At a time when recordable CDs were not yet common, a rewritable 100 MB disk was an affordable way for designers and others with big files to hand work around.

The click of death

According to a 1998 explainer on Low End Mac, Zip and Jaz drives were designed to retract, clean and recalibrate their heads when they went to sleep or failed to read a disk. Continuous clicking was a sign that the disk had become unreadable, usually because a drive had damaged it by writing incorrectly. The nasty part was that putting a damaged disk into another drive made that drive click too, and could even damage its heads. DOS Days attributes the fault to misaligned read heads and says it mainly affected early ZIP 100 drives.

In 1998 a class action was filed in a Delaware state court. According to the Deseret News in April 2001, the plaintiffs alleged a manufacturing or design defect in Zip drives and disks that caused data to be lost. The settlement Iomega proposed offered US customers who bought a Zip drive between 1 January 1995 and 19 March 2001 rebates on Iomega products, free technical support for "clicking" problems, and a donation of $1 million in products and services to schools. The plaintiffs' lawyer said the class could cover as many as 28 million buyers. According to The Globe and Mail, the rebates ranged from $5 to $40, and the only cash went to the plaintiffs' lawyers, up to $4.7 million. Iomega's CEO said the company continued to dispute the underlying allegations but believed that bringing closure was in the interests of shareholders and customers.

More capacity, still overtaken

Iomega kept raising capacity. According to DOS Days, by 1999 it had the 250 MB ZIP 250 ($180), and in 2002 the 750 MB ZIP 750, the first Zip disk to hold more than a CD. But Silicon UK's look back puts the Zip's sales peak in the mid-to-late 1990s and says that in the early 2000s it lost out to CD-R, CD-RW and then USB flash drives. As PCs shipped with hard disks of several gigabytes, the need for external media itself faded.

On 8 April 2008 EMC announced a cash tender offer for Iomega at $3.85 a share, about $213 million. EMC's release said Iomega would form the core of a new consumer and small-business division, and it no longer mentions Zip at all. According to Silicon UK and Low End Mac, in 2013 LenovoEMC, a joint venture of EMC and Lenovo, took over the business and the products were rebranded under its name.

Where it fits

Zip was one of the furthest-reaching attempts by a single company, rather than a standards body, to build the next floppy. On capacity it extended the floppy disk; on distribution, the read-only CD-ROM was already becoming the medium for software. Once writable optical discs and flash memory with no moving parts became cheap, the reason to stand between them disappeared. For hardware of the same era, see the hardware timeline.