Ask Lemmy

I remember the first time my Zip drive started doing the click of death. It would ruin any cartridges you put in it.

I had a CD burner made by Iomega. ;)

I think I eventually got into ZIP disks once the price came down a bit, I was only like 12 or 13 at the time, so I didn't have the money to buy it early on.

Yes in 2000 at a major public university we had them in all the computer labs

Yes the school district I was in for elementary thru high school really bought into ZIP and SuperDisk (I think that was the other one) for a brief perios.. Boy was that 100mb a big deal back then. This would have been around 2000

I junked a Zip drive in a job around 2010. Could not figure any good use for it.

In 1998 I considered putting an internal 120MB Superdisk into my first PC build( A "Damage Box" with a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz and Riva TNT2. Shout out to Claude Damage of Ars fame) Went with a stock 3.5 floppy instead.

Zip drives were sadly before my time, but I actually managed to find one in the wild! A parallel port drive in clear blue plastic for $40 at a local used media shop. Just the loose drive and cable, no box or anything. Prooooobably a touch too pricey for a device that wouldn't surprise me if it had the click of death.

Honestly I do kinda miss magnetic media like that! Having a big cartridge with moving parts ya shove into a slot just felt so nice when we used floppies as a very young kid.

My dad used to pirate games and software for us off BBSes. I swear, he would download everything he could find and put it on zip drives. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's got a drawer somewhere filled with all the best software 1995 had to offer.

Yeah. All my college computer animation projects were on zip drives. Guess I'll never see those again.

I have one still. The 124mb one I think. Its how I load samples onto my old Emu e5000 rack sampler. Havent used it in years though. Hopefully it still works.

We had to buy our own for high school, about $5 each. They were used for CAD file storage.

My dad was a techie who always got cool software and games for his computer, way before I was even born. He still keeps his old stuff in the house.

However, last time I checked, I don't ever remember seeing a Zip disk anywhere in the house. Not even a Zip drive. It was all just floppy disks and CDs.

I owned one of the original external units and later a couple of the 3.5" internal drives. Just tossed some discs and that original drive in the trash 2 years ago

I had a SCSI Zip drive, then later a USB version. Didn't really need it for myself too much but it helped out for the rare times someone needed to give me something on that format or when I was helping someone with data recovery/data transfer.

Also used to see them around in computer labs & such so they weren't that rare.

I had one. I don't remember why though... Maybe it came with a PC as part of a sales promotion?

It worked fine but nobody else had one so it was really just used for backups of "large" (at the time) data.

There were some audio recording devices (think 4 and 8 track recorders [not the 8-track players of the 1970s]) that used internal 100MB Zip drives for storage.