Zip drives were once poised to replace the woefully obsolete floppy drive as a standard for removable storage, but failed for three reasons: the cost of the Zip cartridge was (and is) too high, and the cartridges experienced poor reliability, which led to a phenomenon called the “click of death.” That ominous-sounding event was named after a loud clicking that would begin spontaneously in the drive, followed by failure of the cartridge, and often the drive itself. As I recall, the failure was caused by a tearing of the spinning disk, which produced a clicking sound. The torn disk, in turn, damaged the heads of the drive so it tore other disks that you might reasonably have tried. I have two Zip drives in the closet that experienced the click of death. Iomega has conquered the problem and made their drives more robust so the heads are not so easily damaged. The third and probably dominant reason was the availability of cheap, fast recordable/rewritable CD-ROM (CD-RW) drives which use much cheaper media and can be read on any computer with a CD-ROM drive.

This Zip drive is a small, black plastic device that weighs only eight ounces — nice and portable. The drive has an irregular shape, with an indentation on one side. That side has two wide rubber feet, so you can place the drive either flat or on its side, depending on the space you have available. A standard USB cable plugs into the back of the drive, and the other end goes into your computer or a USB hub. The drive uses a USB 1.1 connection, not the newer and faster USB 2.0 version; but I suspect USB 1.1 extracts all the speed this drive can produce. Although fast, it’s not as fast as a hard drive.

Unlike some earlier external Zip drives, this one does not make you lug around an external power supply. Instead, it uses the power available on the USB bus to power the drive. So you only need to plug in one connecting wire, which handles both power and signal. And (at least with Windows XP) that connection is effortless. All I had to do is plug the drive into a USB connection and Windows XP recognized the drive, assigned a drive letter, and voila, it was ready to use! Fortunately, I didn’t read the instructions, which called for installation of the software and drivers first. I just plugged the drive into the computer and it worked immediately! If I had installed the drivers first, I might have encountered a problem addressed in the fine print, which says that for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0, the drivers convert the USB ports to work only with Iomega devices. That’s pretty rude!

The Zip drive installed on my notebook computer equally flawlessly, and ran off its USB port as well. I was curious whether the notebook computer would supply enough power, but it seems to be adequate. I also wonder how much additional drain on the notebook battery  the drive will entail, but I haven’t tested that yet.

Now here’s the hard question: With the availability of cheap CD-RW drives, why would anyone want a Zip drive? The answer is: you may not. CD-RW discs are considerably cheaper than Zip disks, hold much more data, and can be read by most computers made in the last couple of years without additional equipment. However, Zip drives have a few advantages: 

• They are much faster to write to than CD-RW drives.
• They have no theoretical limits on how many times you can reuse them. CD-RW discs have a theoretical limit of 1000 writes. That probably won’t be a problem, but if you need to reuse the disk a lot, the Zip disk may be preferable. 
• The Zip disk is enclosed in a plastic cartridge, so is protected from scratches that could render a CD-RW disc useless. 
• A USB-powered drive like this can be shared between computers simply by plugging it into the USB port, which makes it a practical way to transfer large files between computers. But not as good as networking.

I’ve heard several students in my classes opine that Zip drives are good for backups. In my view, a Zip drive is a poor choice for a backup system. A CD-R disc is far cheaper (less than 50¢) and holds 7.5 times as much data. If I had to choose between a Zip drive and a CD-RW drive, the latter would get my nod every time. The only medium that is worse than a Zip drive for backup is the floppy disk!

If you want more information contact 

Iomega Corporation Headquarters
4435 Eastgate Mall
San Diego, CA 92121
Phone: (858) 795-7000
Fax: (858) 795-7001