A few months back, I made a mistake. I walked into a Best Buy (should I just stop there?) and asked a clerk if they had any Zip disks. "No, we don't carry those anymore," he said. "They're old technology. What you need is a thumb drive."

Don't presumptious people aggravate you? What I need? What I need? "How would you possibly know what my needs are?" I asked.

He just kinda looked at me with a blank stare. "Umm... I guess I don't." Right.

What exactly replaced the floppy disk? The writable CD? The writable DVD? The USB flash drive? Network storage?

Well, it should have been the Zip disk. But Iomega messed things up. How? I'll tell you.

I remember a time in the early nineties when I had all my personal data backed up on 300 floppies. Second hard drives were too expensive for the average user as were CD burners which at the time cost about $1500. I still remember the local computer shop that would burn a CD with your data for you for $75! I actually took them up on this, believe it or not. One CD meant that I could chunk the 300 floppies and not have to remember which disk contained what. I think I shocked them when I brought in my shoeboxes of disks. They had advertized that they would load your disks for you. My 300 disks led to a new policy in which they would no longer do this, but send a tape drive home with you to grab your data. I don't know... $75 for a CD is mind boggling today. For that price I don't think that copying the files from my 300 disks was too much to ask.

Around that time I saw my first Iomega Zip drive. As described above, no regular computer user had his own CD burner at the time. But with the Zip drive, you cold fit 100 MB on one disk! That was the equivalent of almost 70 floppies. A few years later, Iomega would release a 250 megabyte model and today they sell a Zip drive that will write 750 MB onto a single disk which is slightly more than a standard CD.

So how come I'm the only one using them? I mean, really, I don't personally know anyone who uses a Zip drive anymore although Iomega still sells all three models.

In reality, the Zip drive should have replaced the floppy drive.

They are better than a CD because you can constantly write to them. Granted, you can use CDRW disks or create multiple burn sessions on a regular CD, but all of this is too much trouble. With a Zip disk, I can just continually throw files at it the same as I would any hard drive on my machine. In other words, I can write to it dynamically.

They're better than thumb drives in my opinion. Okay, actually, I think they are used differently. Thumb drives will do the same thing I describe in the paragraph above. However, the nice thing about a Zip disk is that I can write a category on a label and use different Zip disks for different purposes. I can't imagine having half a dozen flash drives, each for a different purpose (although I am sure there are some who do).

I keep a Zip 250 USB drive on my desk at school. Having seen too many hard drives die, I'm paranoid about losing the information I'm working on. As I've been writing the prospectus for my dissertation, I make backups to a Zip disk a couple of times a day. I back up the relevant documents and my bibliographical database. This will become even more important once I begin the actual dissertation.

At home I have a Zip 750 attached to the eMac. It's great for storing the original installation files for software that I've bought online. The other day I bought and downloaded Photoshop Elements 4. The installation download was a huge 450 MB. I pulled out the Zip disk that had Elements 3.0 on it, deleted that old version and copied the new one to it--in case I ever need to reinstall. Why not just copy this to a CD? Well, I can store lots of programs on there, add them whenever I want, and delete the old versions. I downloaded Quicken 2006 a few weeks back, too. I keep that installation file on the same Zip disk. In fact, I have two disks simply labeled "Programs." If I get a new version of a program, I can simply delete the old version off the disk. No need to burn a whole new CD. I have another disk that contains a kabillion Adobe fonts that I've collected over the years--especially from the time when I used to do graphic design. I don't want to get rid of these fonts, and occasionally I need to install one of them, but there's no need to keep them on my hard drive, so the Zip disk works nicely.

But I'm assuming that you don't use a Zip drive. And this is Iomega's fault. I see two reasons for the fact that Zip drives peaked a few years ago, but have declined ever since.

The first is that the media is too expensive. A 750 MB disk will cost you $15. And a 250 MB disk costs $12. Get this--a single 100 MB disk costs $9! Can you imagine? When the average 700 MB CDROM costs about 10¢, this makes no sense to the average consumer, regardless of the advantages I describe above. For that difference in price, the average user will simply burn that 39k Word file to a CD and throw it away after it's been transported.

Second, Iomega should have never made the user have to upgrade the drive just to read newer media. When I bought my first digital camera, the largest compact flash card was 256MB. The same card reader that read those CF cards will read the newer ones that are a gigabyte in size. Why Iomega didn't design the Zip drives to do the same thing as larger capacity disks were released is beyond me. Well, actually it's not. I suppose it was about money. But I think that's come back to bite them.

It's too bad. If Iomega had addressed the two issues above, I have no doubt that Macs and PC's would have come with a DVD/CDROM drive in one bay and a Zip drive in the second bay. And the Zip could have replaced the now defunct floppy drive a decade ago. It's not meant to be, though.

At least they work for me.

Tags: Macintosh