Ask Lemmy

I think I eventually got into ZIP disks once the price came down a bit, I was only like 12 or 13 at the time, so I didn't have the money to buy it early on.

I tried them, they never seemed quite reliable enough. We used DAT tapes, CR-ROMs, and then just hard drives. At first hard drives in external enclosures then HD docks with bare drives.

The sound of the "Click of Death" still haunts me.

We had Jazz drives too, which just failed and caused you to lose a larger amount of data than a zip.

I had a SparQ drive - I did the sums, and it was the most cost-effective. A whole gigabyte per cartridge! Room for everything! I still have it in a box somewhere. It has some weird old connection... ah, parallel port according to Wikipedia.

The mad thing about it was that the drive malfunctioned a few months after I bought it. I took it back to the retailer and discovered it had been discontinued. But they still had one out the back, so the assistant swapped it for my defective one. Phew! In hindsight I should have asked for a refund. But hey, with two 1Gb cartridges I had enough storage for a lifetime!

I had a zip drive. Eventually it got the click of death though. First PC had 5 1/4 and 3.5in drives.

That was the path I took, but I remember a few college friends and several professors had a Zip drive, as did many of the computers in the lab. By the time I had the money and the need for something like that, 1Gb flash drives were cheaper.

There were some audio recording devices (think 4 and 8 track recorders [not the 8-track players of the 1970s]) that used internal 100MB Zip drives for storage.

Dont forget jazz drives, superdisks, syquest drives, Bernoulli drives, and cdr/rw, dvd+/-r, dvd-ram and tape drives!

I was in college and working in a student computer lab at the height of zipdrives. There was a gap where floppies were way too small, CD writers were either molasses slow or not in a public university's budget, and USB was uncommon. SCSI was "da bomb!" in the parlance of the time.

Zip disks were one of the main avenues of piracy between students.

Zip drives were a must have for graphic design students in its heyday. They were relatively affordable (around $150 USD for the drive, $10 per disk iirc) and had a capacity of 100 Megabytes per disk, which was sorta shitty for removable storage even then but good enough for design project assets. There was little else commercially available at the time that was affordable and allowed you to easily port files between home/work/school, so they were everywhere in certain circles in the late 90s, particularly in design.

They were flimsy and unfortunately kinda unreliable, though, so if you heard the dreaded "click of death," it meant your disk was hosed. They eventually started selling 250 MB drives, and I remember there was the "Jaz" drive whose disks could hold 1 GB, but by then I think people were just done with Iomega's shit. I didn't know anyone that owned a frickin Jaz drive. When USB thumb drives became a thing around the turn of the millennium, Zip drives pretty much disappeared overnight. Good fuckin riddance, they sucked.

Yep. I've used 5 1/4s, 3.5s, Zip, CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVDs, DVD-Rs, DVD-RWs, BD, BD-R, BD-RW, Thumb/Flash, SD, Micro SD, and CF. The only one I can think of that I never personally used were Tapes, but I know people who did. They kind of came and went in a hurry it felt like to me.

I had one at work at one time, and I saved a disc for a long time as a keepsake, but I lost it.

I remember the first time my Zip drive started doing the click of death. It would ruin any cartridges you put in it.

I still have a couple drives and a bunch of disks. I keep telling myself I'll resurrect my college homework for a laugh one day. Unfortunately it's hard to find a reasonably modern motherboard to hook them up (let alone finding drivers), so in the closet they sit.

I had a CD burner made by Iomega. ;)

I had one (more than one actually) as it could store soooo much more data than a floppy disk and I needed it to move data (and pirated software) around. At work we had magneto-optic drives with a whopping 240 megs of data, IIRC

I owned one of the original external units and later a couple of the 3.5" internal drives. Just tossed some discs and that original drive in the trash 2 years ago

I had a SCSI Zip drive, then later a USB version. Didn't really need it for myself too much but it helped out for the rare times someone needed to give me something on that format or when I was helping someone with data recovery/data transfer.

Also used to see them around in computer labs & such so they weren't that rare.

I had one. I don't remember why though... Maybe it came with a PC as part of a sales promotion?

It worked fine but nobody else had one so it was really just used for backups of "large" (at the time) data.

I had a zip drive, jaz drive and a super disk 120mb 3.5" floppy drive at one point.

• most people did the floppy / USB drive path
• but if you were in a field that needed more storage, then it became the floppy / SyQuest / ZIP / USB drive path
  • SyQuest disks (and drives) were a serious pain in the ass, temperamental and flaky as hell …

My high school didn't have them, but the vocational school where I took extra classes did, as did our family's PC. I thought they were great. This was about 2001-2004ish, flash drives weren't a thing yet, and burning a CD to hold a single word doc or powerpoint or something like that seemed really wasteful.

Sometimes I would put a couple mp3s on a zip drive and bring them to school to listen to while I was working on a project.

I knew people who had them when I was in highschool, but I never really used them until I started college in 99. They went out of favor after USB flash drives became cheaper shortly after that. I guess I only really got to use zip disks for like a year and a half lol

(UK) my dads office had those for a good few years in the late 90's, 250mb and 500mb. Which I thought was a huge chunk of data. Roll along 2003 and University and we had ... gasp ...1gb thumb drives, at which point I realised I could email myself documents.

Yeah, but they were rarely used. Pretty much went straight from floppies to burning CDs at my house.

Pretty sure I still have the zip drive. It has a scsi connector, but pretty sure there's a scsi card in there somewhere too. They were only popular for a small slice of time. Just like those mini tape drives with the cartridges that were about the size of a tictac container. I probably have that too.