Have Zip Drives Become Obsolete?

[imported_g33k]

Are their any good reasons to buy them anymore?

 

[Lonyo]

No.

 

[MobiusPizza]

No, memory drives are so much better

 

[bob4432]

imo, they became obsolete for me about 4-5 years ago, right after they came out because of the damn zip click of death, lost a lot of important data that was "backed up"

 

[ProviaFan]

I have a 100mb Zip drive from way back when, and still use it due to the convenience and because the media is reusable (I had a very bad experience with CD-RWs and will not touch them). With that said, CD-Rs are cheap enough that I would use those for the big stuff and carry a thumb drive or three for the smaller reusable storage needs.

 

[Promethply]

Since the price of both CD/DVD burners are quite a bit cheaper than zip drives, not to mention the much lower priced CD/DVD media compared to zip disk, the zip drive's becoming uncompetitive price wise.

And now the fact that the price of 1GB of flash memory is lower than zip drive, is probably the "straw that broke the camel's back".

 

[BurnItDwn]

IMO: They were obselete by 1998 when CD-R Drives came below $300.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Obsolete. Flash drive for data transport, DVD-/CD-R(W) for burning drivers and apps for a fresh install (if you can't use the flash), DVD/CD-R for data backup.

Zip just doesn't fit in anywhere any more and hasn't for years.

 

[epsilon9090]

Reasons why its obsolete:

-GMail
-USB flash drives
-Compactflash/SD cards
-DVD-R
-CD-R

My process:

Gmail it to myself as a special label, put on mem stick, and if really important or big onto cd or dvd

 

[UsandThem]

They died to me a long time ago because:

1. Between Zip and the other "floppy killer" (I can't remember what it was called anymore), they never could kill the floppy off.

2. CD burners for the masses

3. High price of media compared to other available products.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: UsandThem
1. Between Zip and the other "floppy killer" (I can't remember what it was called anymore), they never could kill the floppy off.

LS-120, a Sony product that was compatible with floppy drives as well as their own proprietary media. Ironicly, that was the one that died out some time ago, while Zip drives can still be purchased easily, though I doubt they're flying off the shelves.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: UsandThem
They died to me a long time ago because:

1. Between Zip and the other "floppy killer" (I can't remember what it was called anymore), they never could kill the floppy off.

2. CD burners for the masses

3. High price of media compared to other available products.

Do you mean those 40mb CLICK drives? Or LS 120/ LS 240 (laser servo)?

Originally posted by: ProviaFan
LS-120, a Sony product that was compatible with floppy drives as well as their own proprietary media. Ironicly, that was the one that died out some time ago, while Zip drives can still be purchased easily, though I doubt they're flying off the shelves.

I Had High hopes for LS 120 and LS 240 shame it never made it very far. Fitting all your drivers on a jumbo 240MB high speed floppy would have been very convienent. Also I thought the technology was a product of 3M?

 

[Zepper]

. The LS-120 was an Imation/3M - Matsushi-ta* (aka Panasonic) collaboration. Sony had nothing to do with it. Mitsubishi made some drives too - perhaps under license.
. I still have one in my machine as it handles standard floppy disks much faster than a regular drive. I sure wished the LS-240 drive had caught on enough that the price became reasonable - it could put 20MB on a standard floppy diskette!
. But they are definitely obsolete due to the price of optical media. The Zip drive was obsolete from the day it was introduced due to unreliability. It's a wonder that Iomega survived after frittering away the good will earned in the Bernoulli Box days with the Zip fiasco. If they weren't selling a lot of rebadged standard external optical and hard drives, they probably would be dead.

.bh.

* I had to put a hyphen in the Matsushi-ta as there is a "censored" word in there without it. How dumb can you get. If you're going to censor at all, kindly fix the damn parser!!! .bh.

 

[Excelsior]

I agree about LS-120..I thought it was pretty cool..I wish it had become popular.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Excelsior
I agree about LS-120..I thought it was pretty cool..I wish it had become popular.

Main reason it probably never got anywhere was that it came to market too late - everyone already had ZIP drives. Schools, businesses, individuals - they'd all jumped on the ZIP drive, and thus weren't going to re-purchase large media storage solutions all over again. That, and the first generation LS-120 drives were very slow.
Kind of sucks though; I did still like the LS-120 concept more than ZIP disks.

 

[DigitalX]

I actually bought a bunch of zip100 stuff last year, but they are just too bulky and its media are kind of expensive for their capacity. Thank God I sold them off on ebay...did not profit from them, but thank god they are gone.

I Just got myself a external CD-RW drive using CD-RW disks, which holds more data and more cost effective. Just need to sell more of my stuff and buy a DVD+/-RW drive to replace that.

 

[UsandThem]

Originally posted by: Googer

Originally posted by: UsandThem
They died to me a long time ago because:

1. Between Zip and the other "floppy killer" (I can't remember what it was called anymore), they never could kill the floppy off.

2. CD burners for the masses

3. High price of media compared to other available products.

Do you mean those 40mb CLICK drives? Or LS 120/ LS 240 (laser servo)?

LS-120. At the time their was Zip 100 Mb (I think) disks and the LS-120 drive that would write to regular floppies as well. The LS-120 drives were hyped as floppy replacements, but that didn't last very long.

 

[IGBT]

..I still use em. But have lost data to click death..anybody know why they fail like that?? They are handy for moving files around..but largely obsolete.

 

[Zepper]

There's a good explanation of the Zip drive "Click Of Death" on http://www.grc.com . There are some free utils there to help with the problem.

.bh.

 

[Continuity27]

Of course Zip is dead, not even Iomega deals with it as much, if at all.

They have a new disk device out called the Rev though.
Rev.

Rev has a much better capacity than DVDs or CDs, it's smaller than a floppy disk... but the thing that keeps people away are the astronomical pricing. The drive itself is around $400 and each disk is $60.

What Zip and Rev etc were are portable hard drives, originally meant to compete with tapes, not optical media, which blew tapes and zips away. Flash memory goes a step further.

One thing it has is, if you need a really safe backup, you can look into tapes or the Rev, because DVDs scratch too easily, and don't last as long sitting on a shelf even.

I just use DVDs myself..

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: Continuity27
Of course Zip is dead, not even Iomega deals with it as much, if at all.

They have a new disk device out called the Rev though.
Rev.

Rev has a much better capacity than DVDs or CDs, it's smaller than a floppy disk... but the thing that keeps people away are the astronomical pricing. The drive itself is around $400 and each disk is $60.

What Zip and Rev etc were are portable hard drives, originally meant to compete with tapes, not optical media, which blew tapes and zips away. Flash memory goes a step further.



One thing it has is, if you need a really safe backup, you can look into tapes or the Rev, because DVDs scratch too easily, and don't last as long sitting on a shelf even.

I just use DVDs myself..

damn, that rev thing looks nice

anyway, yeah, zip and rev are just hard drive mechanisms with portable disks. the type of drive was invented by syquest, i believe, which went out of business because it could not compete with zip.

and zip drives were dead several years ago, and with 1 GB flash drives and dvdrw readily available i don't think anything like them will ever come back.

heck, as inexpensive as normal hard drives are getting ($0.25/gig) it's almost cheaper to buy another drive to back up to than using DVDs, and its far more convenient. only problem is hard drives only last about 5 or 6 years, mechanicaly, so for archival purposes pretty much nothing can beat tape

 

[imported_g33k]

Well I'm asking because, ZIP's are still being stocked by both B&M and online vendors. So, evidently people must be buying them despite cheaper alternatives.

 

[stickybytes]

i haven't used a zip since 2-3 years ago even though i had intentionally went out and purchased one for around a hundred bucks. realized for the most part that it was a waste of money. usb thumb drives are so much better than zips.

 

[UsandThem]

Originally posted by: g33k
Well I'm asking because, ZIP's are still being stocked by both B&M and online vendors. So, evidently people must be buying them despite cheaper alternatives.

Yeah, and Sony, up to like a year ago kept making the Betamax.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: UsandThem
Yeah, and Sony, up to like a year ago kept making the Betamax.

Huh? I thought there were several kinds of Beta... my parents had one of the consumer/home Beta VCRs, and sold it for next to nothing at a garage sale many years ago, and at that point I don't think we had seen any Beta tapes for numerous years before then. However, I have heard rumors that a different kind of Beta something is still in use in studios...