Kids today will never know the tyranny of a 1.44MB floppy disk. This format was so traumatic that no one used it for several decades, but today the “save” icon in our applications still looks like it.
Again, despite many claimants to the thronethe floppy disk remained relevant until the advent of USB flash drives, and read-only CDs remained relevant during their heyday. Writable disks and flash memory ended the reign of the floppy disk, but this could have happened earlier with the Zip drive. If only there wasn’t a fatal flaw in this storage technology.
What Zip Drives Should Have Been (And Why They Got Removed)
They were literally a big deal
I don’t have clear memories of installing Windows 95 from a dozen floppies or video games that came on six or seven floppies. Computer data sizes continued, but common floppy disks remained at 1.44 MB, although 2.88 MB and even larger disks never caught on.
So you can imagine how shocked I was when I opened the pages of my monthly computer magazine and saw an advertisement for a drive that looked like a floppy disk but offered 100MB of storage! Keep in mind that our family computer had just been upgraded from an 80MB hard drive to one with several hundred megs of storage, so these removable drives were large in comparison.
I remember showing the ad to my parents and getting nothing but mild confusion in return. Having little of my own money, I never experimented with Zip drives when they were new.
Perhaps this was for the best, as these drives were intended for business users and media professionals. CD burners were very expensive and you couldn’t rewrite discs yet, and if you were working with massive images or 3D models, you needed space. Zip drives will also grow, reaching 250MB and even 750MB. This last measure was aimed directly at CD-RWs, but as history shows, it didn’t work out.
The infamous “click of death” and why it happens
Trust is everything
There are many reasons why a zip drive will never replace a floppy drive. They were too expensive, not enough people bought them, so file sharing was a problem, and of course recordable and rewritable CDs stole their thunder as prices dropped. However, another important issue was reliability.
At some point, the Zip drive may start making a clicking noise due to a read/write head mismatch. This was the infamous “click of death”.
Zip drives have quietly become data traps
Feeling lucky?
Not only did this mean the drive was broken, but it could damage the Zip drive and cause data loss. If that wasn’t bad enough, the problem (Very rarely, according to Gibson Research) contagious! The drive can damage the drive, which can damage the next drive it’s inserted into.
In 1998 (This was reported by CNET) Zip users filed a class action lawsuit against Iomega:
They say the damage that renders computer discs unreadable is caused by bits of metal embedded in the discs and lubricant that breaks down and collects in the drive mechanism.
Think about what that means. Although Iomega says the problem affects less than half a percent of drives, that means you don’t know if the drive you’re going to put your drive in will destroy it, or if the drive itself is poison that could kill the drive.
Zip drives were data traps for other reasons as well. Because they were magnetic, this meant that the data would not last as long as backups of, say, optical discs. However, a bigger concern was that no one would have the equipment needed to read Zip disks because it was proprietary and niche.
Zip drives are the modern archivist’s nightmare
Why is it not read?
It’s not hard to imagine that there is some interesting information stored on Zip disks from the 90s that has never been recovered. Images, source code for software, documentation, the list goes on. Due to the click of death and its contagious nature, any archivist given a stack of Zip disks to store can destroy either the data or the hardware (or both) through no fault of their own.
Libraries and large organizations working with the intention of storing their 90s archives in the cloud or, better yet, in modern long-term archive formats, will find Zip drives a pain to deal with.
Hard lessons from the zip drive era
Is history doomed to repeat itself?
There are many lessons to be learned from the zip drive. People trusted it because it was more convenient and had a higher capacity, but these things do not make the average reliable. Perhaps we are giving up on optical media too soon. After all, people only now understand Bit rotten on SSDs.
At the very least, it should motivate you more to apply 3-2-1- reserve rule.
