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Zip Drive

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Zip Drive

(hardware, storage)
A disk drive from Iomega Corporation which takes removable 100 megabyte hard disks. Both internal and external drives are manufactured, making the drive suitable for backup, mass storage or for moving files between computers. Software is included to help with file organisation. The internal SCSI model offers up to 60 MB / minute transfer rate.

The Zip drive was awarded Byte's Readers' Hardware Choice Award 1996. The company has started to manufacture a larger Jaz drive, which takes one gigbyte disks.

http://iomega.com/index.html.
This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

Zip disk

An earlier 3.5" removable disk format from Iomega. When Zip disks came out in 1995 with 100MB cartridges, their huge storage compared to floppy disks made them very popular. However, like all removable media of that era, the Zip was eclipsed by recordable CDs and the Internet.

Storage capacities evolved to 250MB and 750MB in 1998 and 2002 respectively, but the USB and FireWire-based 750MB drives could only read but not write 100MB cartridges. The Zip was a floppy-like technology with design concepts from hard disks and Iomega's earlier Bernoulli disks. The drive's bundled software could lock the files for security. See Bernoulli box.


Zip Cartridge
Zip drives were introduced in 1995 and became very popular for a number of years as a transportable, rewritable storage medium.
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