Ran into an old Zip drive at a flea market and it got me steamed

Paid $5 for a box of Zip disks at a yard sale last Sunday. Took em home and realized my old 250MB drive fried out like 8 years ago during a lightning storm. What irks me is Iomega had something decent going before they started chasing the wrong market. Why did they have to push that clunky 2GB version instead of making the 250MB drives cheaper and faster? Anyone still have a working Zip drive or am I the only one who misses loading up disks for backup instead of dealing with cloud subscriptions?

2 comments

2 Comments

noah_walker163d ago

Man I had a 250MB Zip drive back in like 2003 and I loved it. I got a whole box of disks from a friend who worked at a recording studio and I used em to shuttle music files around before thumb drives got cheap. You're right about that 2GB version being a mess - I knew a guy who bought one and the damn thing would eat disks like nobody's business. I still got my old drive in a box somewhere in the garage, probably dead as a doornail but I can't bring myself to toss it. Nothing beats the feeling of clicking those disks in and hearing that little whirr sound, way better than staring at a spinning circle on Dropbox.

amyr573d ago

Remember reading somewhere that the Zip drive was technically a "superfloppy" format, which always sounded so silly to me but they were genuinely fast for their time. @noah_walker16 totally get not being able to toss it, I still got a couple of those disks in a drawer at home with old photos and mixes on them, probably unreadable now but it feels wrong to just throw them away. I heard the 2GB ones actually used a different technology entirely, something with lasers or whatever, which is probably why they were so finicky and ate disks like you said. That click sound was so satisfying though, way better than watching a progress bar or waiting for a cloud sync to finish.