Tedium:
As proprietary, non-standardized formats go, Iomega’s Zip drive got a heck of a lot further than most of its competitors. It managed to improve on a format people were used to (the old floppy) just enough that it ensured it’d gain popularity. It fit niches for people who had to share a lot of data. And it even had a sizable base of home users—which was impressive for its time. But the Zip drive was a famously problematic product, and one whose faults created big problems for Iomega. Today’s Tedium talks about the Zip drive, along with the era of proprietary PC storage.
I’ve often wondered if Iomega could have hung on if they hadn’t ignored the Click of Death issue. If they had been more responsive to customers, we might have stuck with them. Now, with the rise of the internet and the ability of customers to communicate and warn each other much more quickly, there’s no way Iomega could have hidden the issue for as long as they did.
I still have a Zip and Jaz drive, “just in case”. I fear that I find some of the disks in a box somewhere, and have no way to get the obviously very important data off of them.
I had the Click of Death issue so early and so often that I totally boycotted any and all Iomega products.
Done.
With.
Iomega.
Forever.
Period.
I loved the large, removable storage but I too suffered the click of death and dumped my Zip pretty early.
For a while, I booted my Performa 550 running System 7 off of a Zip drive, thinking it was faster than the computer’s hard drive. My mom was not thrilled.
Those were the days.
Our little record label had 10-12 Zip drives and 2 Jaz drives going all the time. I think 4 of the Zip drives failed with the Click of Death, and I do remember being pissed at Iomega for ignoring it. We switched quickly to CD-R, which was coming down in price enough that even write-once media was ok (it also had Audio CD benefits for us). Iomega may have held on a little longer, but CD-R probably would have killed them within a couple more years anyway.
I remember taking SyQuest drives (44 mb if I recall) and prints to the lab for drum scans, running copies to the print facility, and stressing I wouldn’t get my $80 disk back. Compared to this, Zip drives were a revelation. I must have had a couple hundred of them (still have a box of them kicking around somewhere).
I skipped the Jaz as issues with Zips meant I didn’t trust Iomega for larger storage, and right around that time burning CDs and then DVDs was becoming a thing. At that point, who cared if you never got your .20 CD back.
The place I was working had standardized on Syquests (first 44mb, then 88, then 200) for archiving and service bureau work when Zip came along. The handful of Zip drives we’d obtained worked fine until the Click reared its head. A sad legacy for a technology that actually made it as far as a standard feature on Mac’s minitowers. I was relieved to see burnable CDs replace both.
I was excited to try a new format for big removable storage when it appeared; the Jaz drive I got with my 1997 Power Computing minitower worked for a bit, then seized up and effectively ruined a couple of the disks I’d bought for it. I’d had hopes for that format, too.
Iomega crapped the bed, then ignored the mess. Twice.
Damn, you know what, I completely forgot that at one point we had a Power Computing system with a built in Jaz drive as well. I was digging through some old photos and files and found it after you sparked my memory.
Everyone was kinda floundering there for a year or so figuring out how to handle the exploding file sizes with high resolution photos. Thank goodness burning exploded when it did.
I’ve still got that late generation Zip drive, with the firewire 400 connection, pictured in the article. I think it’ll still work if hooked up to a Mac with FW, even FW800 with converter. I do know it worked as of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), but I’m not sure if it’ll still boot in macOS.
Seriously. I had such hopes for the Jaz, too.
It wasn’t too long after that job that I was freelancing for a small group that had standardized on sending CDs. They had a huge box of plastic clamshell CD cases for getting them to the service bureau, sometimes sending out as many as five a day.