Today’s children will never know the tyranny of the 1.44 MB floppy disk. This format was so traumatic that today the “save” icon in our applications still looks like it, even though no one has used it for several decades.
Still, despite many pretenders to the throneThe floppy disk remained relevant until the arrival of USB flash drives, and it remained relevant while read-only CDs were in their heyday. Recordable disks and flash memory ended the reign of the floppy disk, but it could have happened sooner with the Zip drive. If only this storage technology didn’t have a fatal flaw.
What Zip drives were supposed to be (and why they took off)
They were literally a big deal.
I don’t exactly have fond memories of installing Windows 95 from dozens of floppy disks or video games that came on six or seven floppy disks. Computer data sizes continued, but common floppy disks remained at 1.44 MB, although there were 2.88 MB and even larger disks that never caught on.
So you have to understand how impressed I was when I opened the pages of my monthly computer magazine and saw an advertisement for a drive that at first glance looked like a floppy disk, but offered a whopping 100MB of storage! Keep in mind that our family computer had just been upgraded from an 80MB hard drive to one that had a few hundred megabytes of storage, so these removable drives were huge by comparison.
I remember showing the ad to my parents and receiving nothing but mild confusion in return. Having little money of my own, I was never able to test Zip drives when they were new.
Perhaps that would have been for the best, because these discs were aimed at business users and media professionals. CD burners were very expensive and you still couldn’t rewrite the discs, and if you worked with massive images or 3D models, you needed space. Zip drives would also get larger, with 250 MB and even 750 MB towards the end. That last size was intended directly for CD-RWs, but, as history shows, it didn’t work.
The infamous “click of death” and why it happened
Trust is everything
There are many reasons why the Zip drive never replaced the floppy drive. It was too expensive, not enough people bought them, so file sharing was a problem, and of course recordable and rewritable CDs stole the show as soon as prices dropped. However, another major issue was reliability.
At some point, a Zip drive might start making a clicking noise because the read/write heads had become misaligned. This was the infamous “click of death.”
Zip drives quietly became data traps
Do you feel lucky?
This not only meant that the drive was broken, but it could also damage the Zip drive and cause data loss. If that wasn’t bad enough, the problem was (very rarely according to Gibson Research) contagious! A drive could corrupt a disk, which would then corrupt the next drive it was inserted into.
In 1998 (as reported by CNET) Zip Users Filed Class Action Lawsuit Against Iomega:
They say the damage that makes computer disks unreadable is caused by pieces of metal falling on the disks and a lubricant that breaks down and builds up in the reading mechanism.
Consider what this meant. Although Iomega said the problem affects less than half a percent of drives, it meant I had no idea whether the drive I was about to insert the drive into would destroy it or whether the drive itself was poison that could kill the drive.
Zip drives were data traps for other reasons as well. Because they were magnetic, it meant that the data would not last as long as, for example, backups on optical disks. But a bigger concern was that no one would have the hardware to read Zip disks eventually, since it was proprietary and niche.
Zip drives are a modern archivist’s nightmare
Why is it not read?
It’s not hard to imagine that there is interesting data from the ’90s trapped on Zip drives that can never be recovered. Photos, software source code, documents, the list goes on. Due to the click of death and its contagious nature, any archivist given a stack of Zip disks to preserve could end up destroying the data or the hardware (or both) through no fault of their own.
Libraries and large organizations working with archives from the 90s with the intention of preserving them in the cloud or in modern, better file formats in the long term will find themselves with Zip disks, and they will be difficult to deal with.
The hard lessons of the Zip Drive era
Is history doomed to repeat itself?
There are many lessons to be learned from the Zip campaign. People trusted it because it was more convenient and had greater capacity, but these things do not make a medium trustworthy. So perhaps we are abandoning optical media too quickly. After all, people are only now becoming familiar a little rotten on SSD.
At the very least, it should make you more eager to apply the 3-2-1- backup rule.
