Friday, July 1, 2011

The Iomega Zip Drive - A Speedy History

For numerous years the floppy disk dominated the information backup market place for the home user as they provided cost-effective data storage. Employing floppies have been awkward, slow and very unreliable but in the time it had been all we had. Then along came the Zip drive as well as the planet of information backup changed overnight thanks for the creator from the Zip drive - Iomega. No longer were you restricted to a paltry 1.4MB of disk storage - now you might match 100MB on a single single Zip disk. Later this increased to, a then, substantial 750MB of storage space which was totally unheard of at the time.

Zip drives worked in practically specifically the same way as a floppy disk except they have been physically larger and provided an a lot increased information transfer rate than residence users had ever noticed before in an "external" data storage gadget. The biggest dilemma with Zip drives is that though they have been similar to floppy disks you nevertheless essential a separate Zip drive to study or write to these disks which in turn meant more expense for home users. Also there was a rival technological innovation called the LS-120 or SuperDisk that discovered favour with several pc suppliers (ironically enough the Zip drive long outlived the LS-120 when it comes to recognition and usefulness) so the Zip drive faced an uphill struggle from it is introduction to an eager computer industry.

The Zip drive was/is accessible inside a few various flavors. There have been parallel, SCSI, USB and IDE Zip drives offered available on the market at 1 stage. This meant that regardless of what type of computer you had you'd have the ability to uncover a Zip drive using a compatible interface. This meant that each Mac and Computer users tended to love the Zip drive despite the fact that most Mac users tended to favor the Zips bigger SCSI brother - the Jaz drive... that however is the topic for yet another article for yet another day.

Alas for all their ingenuity the Zip drive has turn out to be all but obsolete. The present growth in tough drive storage capacities has meant that any storage device supplying less than 10GB - 20GB of storage space is all but ignored as a helpful backup device. Any computer user studying this who has ever owned a Zip drive will possibly feel exactly the same sense of nostalgia I felt when writing it. The Zip drive was extremely revolutionary in it really is day and paved the way for a genuine boom in information backup technological innovation for residences and little businesses. RIP Zip drive.... you shall be missed.

Iomega Zip drive provided a rugged and reliable form of data backup for many years. If you want to know what a zip drive is and how it works then pay a visit iomegazipdrive.com for more information on Zip drives and all kinds of backup devices.

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