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	Iomega Zip Drive

The floppy disk ruled the data backup market for the home user for a long time because it was an economical means of storage. Agreed, using them was awkward, slow and completely undependable but it was the only solution available to the home user. But the introduction of the Zip drive completely changed the world of data backup. Iomega first introduced the Zip drive. Now instead of measly 1.4MB of disk storage, you could accommodate 100MB on one Zip disk. Some time later it could accommodate gigantic 750MB of storage space that was regarded as miracle in those days.

Zip drives work almost similarly to a floppy disk except that they were physically bigger and had much higher data transfer rate than other "external" data storage device. However, the biggest problem with Zip drives is that though they were similar to floppy disks you still required a separate Zip drive to read or write to these disks that resulted in higher costs to home users. Moreover there was a competing technology called the LS-120 or SuperDisk that was supported by most computer manufacturers (strangely the Zip drive survived the LS-120 for long time in terms of popularity and usefulness) making the Zip drive struggle for its survival, right from the moment it was first introduced.

The Zip drive was/is found in a few different formats. There were parallel, SCSI, USB and IDE Zip drives found in the market at one time. This meant irrespective of the type of computer you owned, you could get a Zip drive with a compatible interface. Hence it found favor with both Mac and PC users.

Sadly for all their originality the Zip drive has become nearly outdated. The rapid growth in hard drive storage capacities implies that any storage device whose capacity is below 10GB - 20GB of storage space is not accepted as a feasible backup device. Though Zip drive was completely revolutionary for its time and opened the door to rapid advances in data backup technology for homes and small businesses, it did not survive.

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