Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

Similarly, articles just gloss right over the "click of death" without any technical explanation of what goes wrong. Why were these drives and/or media so prone to failure?

There's nothing new in this article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

The Zip drives that followed were abysmal. We sold a lot of them initially (I was working in a computer store in the early nineties), but sales cratered once the "click of death" became infamous. SyQuest drives suffered from similar reliability issues.

The founder of SyQuest, Syed Iftikhar, later left and set up another company called Castlewood, which introduced yet another removable drive called the Orb. The Orb was genuinely faster and more reliable than anything Iomega or SyQuest had offered.

But with the advent of cheap flash drives and faster broadband internet, transfer and storage of data shifted decisively away from spinning removable media, and the entire category quietly died, taking Castlewood, Iomega, Imation, and SyQuest with it.

those zip disks were not cheap 10$-15$ each for a paltry 100mb.

the rise of USB sticks really killed them. you could get a 128mb usb stick for similar or cheaper and you didn't need the clunky unreliable zip drive to use them.

The SyQuest had a real hard drive platter in it so you knew it was robust. The Zip platter was harder than a floppy but softer than a hard drive, so you knew it wasn't as robust.

So I had no incentive to buy into Zip. I saw a few people use them but I assumed they'd never heard of SyQuest and didn't know better. I never had anyone ask for data on a Zip disk or want to give me data on a Zip disk, so I never bothered.

Later when the click-of-death started happening, I figured it would die off and people would switch to SyQuest, but then there was Jaz, which wasn't as popular as Zip, and then CD-ROM took over, which held a lot of data, but was still slow (in spite of IDE) and still not as robust as the SyQuest products.

In 1998, at their end, SyQuest had a 4.7 GB unit, I presume to compete with DVD.

So it seems like to me they had an extremely short window to operate without much competition. CD-Rs being about $15 for a spindle and 6.5x the space was an easy pick.

It was, in a lot of ways, too early. I never had one, and I never missed having one. I had other solutions to the problems when they happened. By the time I had the problem, it was not a cost-effective solution.

I know people can pop up and say that it solved some problems for them, but I think the people who it solved problems for, in proportion to the price, weren't enough of a market. By the time they were, CD burners were a much cheaper solution.

If they were 1/4 the price, it might have been a different story... but the price was pretty fundamental to the tech.

You can't buy success. You can buy initial success, but not long term success. By the standards of such products, Zip was relatively successful, because it did have some people it solved a problem for. It was just a minority of their customer base. Enough to hang on for a while, but not to take over the world.

It is the opposite of The Eternal Scroll. It is the hero we need.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuarkXPress

And we'd all have Zip drives and even internal Zip drives reader/writer in our G3. Can be seen on the picture here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_G3

They were big indeed and I'd say huge in the publishing industry. Then the CD writers and then DVD writers began to rule to earth.

I don't even think I've seen a single on here in Russia in the 90s.

5.25 in my fathers company? Sure. 3.5 everywhere else? Da. CDs at some point.

Hell, even minidisc was there (also almost non-existent, I think I know only two people who actually owned a minidisc player).

No sing of Zip.

zip-drives where great - at least compared to what other possibilities where around these days:

overall, zip-drives where not that expensive, especially the medias.

but they died every now& then ...

so it was more or less only a possibility to transfer data, not so much to archive it! this was what cd-r and later dvd-r where there for :)

imho. the "real" problem where often the drives themselfs, they where available with various interfaces, the most common was (!) parallel / "printer-port" / centronics (!) .. veeery slow.

the "best" ones had scsi =?> fast etc. but you needed an scsi-controller with an external connector for that

if i remember it correctly, there where even IDE/PATA-drives available - but i think only internal ones - and later usb-variants (also slow) ...

btw. what where the alternative in the late 1990ties!?

* syquests

great drives, especially the 5.25 inch variants, but they where already "dated" by then. and the 3.5 inch variants where pretty expensive and had reliability-issues ...

additionally: lots of people mistook the 3,5 inch variants for floppy-disk-drives and ruined early models by inserting floppies into them =?> the later got some mechanical protection against that!

* (old) harddisks

my "medium of choice" where old hdds, which i plugged into the machines between which i wanted to transfer data ...

by far the "best" option, but also the most "technical" one ;)

just my 0.02€

Whereas with USB sticks all one needed was a USB port. I immediately wanted a stick.

So when affordable CD-R became available, even though early drives were slow writers, they had the advantage that they could be read from practically any computer. With ubiquitous non-proprietary CD-ROM drives and the huge 700mb capacity, Zip drives were tossed as soon as someone bought a CD-R drive.

Indeed, it was about reliability in the end for Iomega. LGR Covered it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBhEaMp8mw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cALVig8bw9w&t=177s

I also learned a 90's bubble investment tip on TV that if you went to the companies office and night and all the lights were on they were cooking and worth investing in. And the TV investor said he visited Iomega and they were cooking.

Edit: Today I use just 2.5" SSDs in the same way. There's a small sata to usb-c adapter where I plug them in without any further enclosure.

Then I got to experience the click of death and the internet connection was bumped to 100Mbit and I didn't need to replace my zip drive.

Floppy disks were tiny and slow

Zip drives in 1995 were around $200 and 100MB disk for about $20

CD-R burners in 1995 were $1000 and blank CD-R were about $15 each

By 1999 CD-R burners were around $125 and blank discs were around $1 and dropping fast. I remember when they were $0.10 for a 700MB disc in the 2000s

Nowadays probably would need an USB converter, assuming everything still works.

I guess I was just majorly unlucky. clickclickclickclick*...

This is such an odd take to me.

I sold and supported computers in the 1990s. Outside of a few industries, such as desktop publishing, Zip was not popular. The vast majority of computer owners never owned a Zip drive, unlike a floppy or soon to be CDROM.

In fact, I sold far more QIC-80 tape drives for backups than Zip drives.

Zip also didn't vanish overnight, it simple never caught on with most people. However, in the industries that used them, they hung on for a while.

...in retrospect as the article states: swept away by CD-rw and USB sticks, but a great technology! There really was a critical gap in "I need to back up _all_ my files or coursework for the semester" or "Wouldn't it be great to be able to fit TEN games on a floppy instead of ONE game on ten floppies?"

It really was a different era!

I remember that the biggest problems with Zip drives was that most Windows PCs didn’t come with SCSI and that they had some Frankenstein parallel port version.

For context when I bought my Zip drive, my internal hard drive was only 80MB and part of that was used as an emulated hard drive for my Apple //e card.

https://www.deseret.com/1999/8/20/19461583/iomega-president-...

up until mid 90s it was floppies, then since mid 90s it was CDR

it's like saying minidiscs dominated the 90s, which would be as stupid