Zip drive

100MB of rewritable storage.
in the early 2000s, I used CDRs (where you'd lose space since you couldn't rewrite written areas), but I only got a CD burner in 99
before that, zip was a godsend

>tfw never had the click of death
thought zip was the future for years, shit just worked

Whatever the fuck. Who cares?

A lot of people don't remember just how expensive CD players were when they first hit the market. It was a long while before they started dipping down into just the couple of hundred dollars when they had been thousands of dollars. Not to mention how fragile they were. Most people were used to storage mediums you could hold just about any way without damaging the data. VHS, Cassettes, floppy discs. You didn't have to worry about a single fingerprint or small scratch making the media skip or possibly completely unplayable. Early CD players weren't exactly known for their reliability either. It was a fragile expensive media that had the one advantage of holding a lot of data. People wanted stuff they could jam in their pockets and go. They wanted high capacity durable data. For the time the zip drives held that promise.

Not only all of this but also CD WRITERS were not too common of a thing for a very long time. There was a time when the kid with the CD-R capable computer would be able to make money burning stuff for people.

no it wasn't but it was more convenient than the CD-R

CD-R came 1 year earlier than the arrival of the ZIP

ZIP was good enough up until to the era of USB stick in early 2000

ZIP (parallel port version) was the best thing ever for MSDOS file transfer, there was no CD burning programs for MSDOS and you had to rely on 1.44MB floppies unles you had 100MB ZIP

Yeah back when I first got into building PCs in the early 2000's I bought a CD burner. The thing cost me like 70 bucks. Cost me almost as much as my hard drive. A few years later I got a Sony CD/DVD combo drive that had read and write speeds that blew past the old junk drive for 20 bucks. Looking back CDs were a really slow to mature technology. They had been around for almost a decade by the time they really saw commercial adoption and it took almost until the end of the 90's before the ability to write them yourself started showing up in people's home PCs and it wasn't too much longer after that, that the internet and flash drives made them more or less obsolete.

>ZIP Disquette
ftfy

>flash stick
I think you mean USB penors

Because a portable 750mb was insane

I got two words for you sugar... zip disk

>1996ish in Euro shittown
>want to burn l33t warez CDs
>Go and buy CD-R drive
>mfw $600
>Only works on SCSI
>mfw consumer PCs don’t have a SCSI ports
>buy SCSI controller
>Adaptec FTW
>another $200
>mfw I realize that PATA HDD isn’t fast enough to feed CD-R drive
>buy SCSI HDD
>total cost $1000 now
>broke.exe
>only guy with CD burner in town
>”user, could you copy this disc for me?”
>wait_a_minute.gif
>Burn CD-Rs for half the town for $$$
>hackerman.jpg

Get on my level, ZIPlets.

Attached: 2GB-Jaz-drive.jpg (3648x2736, 1.91M)

>>mfw I realize that PATA HDD isn’t fast enough to feed CD-R drive
le buffer underrun face

It's actually USB stick.

Ah, those were the days. *sip*

I had access to a Gateway P90 machine with SCSI hard drives and an HP SCSI CD-R drive. Mitsui Gold media was like $4 a pop, and I'd stay late to burn PS1 game images I downloaded from warez sites and shipped them on the company's dime to all my IRC buddies. Shit was cash.

No, it's a thumb drive

could have set write speed to 1x and buy more ram

This Gen Z thread sure did bring out a lot of millenials and boomers

> 2000s
fast internet

LS120

>super fast extremely vast
I like it already

I had Roadrunner in Las Vegas at the time. Can't remember what the rated speed was, but it definitely kicked the living shit out of the DSL I had before and after.

It was a Yamaha CDR102 4x drive. How dare you, sir!

> buying 4x in 1996
> complaying how expensive

My dad spent about a grand on a 1X Sony eternal CD-ROM drive that used caddies and came with an ISA SCSI card. The games I had access to with that thing blew my friends' minds.

>TWO GIGABYTES OF GRAPHICS

Attached: 1533793480773.jpg (480x542, 37K)

and thats not even getting into the Pentium 200, 64Mb of RAM and 7200rpm hard drive you needed to make it worthwhile...

I actually want one.

/thread

>floppy discs
>discs

do you prefer to transfer files 1.44MB at the time, with a 1KB/s transfer rate, or 100 MB at the time, at 1MB/s?

Attached: slow-and-steady.jpg (600x312, 39K)

I kinda wanted one back in '99 or so.
that being said, at this point, I also did have a CD burner, and CDs were only $1 or 2 a pop (pretty sure I could have probably gotten them cheaper, I was buying single discs), not to mention that everyone had a CD drive so I could at least read 'em everywhere

by the time I really would have needed a Jaz drive and actually had big files to store, I was just using CD-Rs, and I think some time in like 2004 I spent like $30 (had to do a $20 rebate or something) on a 512MB flash drive
for shit I needed to read-write on the go, I just carried around a USB Zip drive (pic related)

Attached: 411RMH59CGL._SX425_.jpg (425x265, 11K)

I never managed to own a zip drive. I'd seen them, and people I knew used them, but by the time I was capable of getting my hands on one, hard drives were already big enough to make them pointless. I remember getting one of the earliest USB 1.1 enclosures and putting a 64GB HDD in it, was fucking amazing back in the day.

I got one of these when they first came out (i.e. begged my dad to buy me one), to have had something like this as an alternative to floppy disks was fucking amazing.

If you were unlucky enough to have bought a first gen iMac in '99, this was really the only way to move files off of your computer unless you bought an external floppy drive, which were hard to come by back then.

I bought my first cd burner in I believe 2001. It was sata I think and $300.

it was comfy media to be honest

nice try jazlet

Attached: dittomax.jpg (1280x960, 174K)

I ended up finally getting one through work. They gave them to us with our Dell laptops that had SCSI ports in the docking stations. I ended up with four in my garage plus a couple that I plugged into servers at work to back up stuff. I have two more internal ones in retired servers that I'm going to yank before I scrap the boxes, but they plug into SCSI controllers on the motherboard, so I'll need a couple Adaptec 2940s or something to use them.

Is that 3.5 native/7 compressed? That's shameless of them...

I have a blu ray drive now
I love burning pirated media onto blu rays for long term back up in case something happens and I don't have access to the internet for a while
I have over 5tbs of pirated games burned on blu rays
I use regular Blu-rays, DL, BDXL, and M-discs
Wish development on optical discs didn't stop, we would have over 1tb discs available to consumers

How much are blanks these days? Fry's unloads an LG drive for like $50 on sale from time to time. I'll probably bite if the media is reasonable now.

Regular BD-Rs go for under a dollar a disc on ebay, BD-R DL are more expensive than single layer and BDXL are more expensive yet with M-disc BDXLs being the most expensive, i see them for over $10 a disc.
If you want m-disc or BDXL then make sure the drive is compatible since not all are.

Don't want to waste a whole CDR on a 20mb file? use a zip disk

RAM was expensive yo

>Is that 3.5 native/7 compressed?
yes

>That's shameless of them
pretty standard for tape media, this is for archiving purposes and not something you'd be accessing every day

Thanks for the heads up on media compatibility. Found a cheap unit on Newegg that is described as "Hitachi/LG" but has an HP logo on the label. Not certain whether it does m-disc or not, so I'll do some more research before buying.

They don't know how much my data will compress. If they can compress this folder of .mp4 files by 50% losslessly I'd like to see it.

Pretty much this (although it was 1.44 MB, not 1.3). IBM came out with a 2.88 MB floppy, but by the time it came along, that wasn't really enough better to be worth the cost. OTOH, even early zip drives could store like 100 MB, IIRC.

Not before CD-R was created, but before it was practical. At the time the zip drive came out, most CD drives still required either proprietary adapter cards or an expensive SCSI card, because ATAPI wasn't widely supported yet. Burners (especially R/W drives) also remained quite expensive until well after 2000, and burning CDs at 1x or 2x is sloooooow, even compared to copying files to zip drive over parallel. And the early CD media wasn't very reliable and coaster were common.

I never had a zip drive myself, though. Couldn't afford it. Mostly made do with floppies until USB flash drives became a thing.

>sata
>2001
Not very likely. SATA didn't come along until 2003.

100MB disk before CD-ROM was a thing and before CD burners were popular

well sure, if you had files that were already compressed you couldn't reasonably expect 100% compression efficiency

these products were geared towards professionals that knew something about what they were buying, at least well enough to see through the marketing buzzwords

Zip drives failed because they ran up against the laws of physics. The rotation speed had to be so high that the head would quickly strip the magnetic coating off the disk.

CD-ROM predates zip drives by 10 years. The drives were just expensive and non-trivial to install because standard ATA (as opposed to ATAPI, which cam later) doesn't support them. You had to either have a machine with SCSI support (expensive) or a proprietary adapter card and a free ISA slot (some sound cards also provided a connector that supported specific drives). You could get a CD-ROM on high-end PCs in the late '80s/early '90s, but it cost $1,000 or more.

CD-ROM is not writable though. CD-R didn't come until later, and then widespread adoption took even longer.

>it cost $1,000 or more
this was true for the cdrs, most of which cost way more than 1k, but not the readers

you could buy a single speed reader for not a much money in the early 90s

Jaz performed just like a 5,400 rpm disc, since that's what it was. I'd take 2GB native with slow hard drive speed over the Ditto.

M-disc compatible drives have an M-Disc logo on them

Attached: m-disc.jpg (300x198, 7K)

Even CD-R drives predate zip drives. They were just insanely expensive. Yes, adoption took longer (for the reasons I noted): that was kind of my point.

In 1990, even a CD-ROM drive could run $1,000+ (mind you, this was still an era when a 1GB HDD could run $2,500). At that point, CD-R units were the size of a washing machine and cost $35,000. By the mid-90s, ROM drives were becoming affordable, but when zip drives debuted in '94, burners had come down a little over $1,000.

Yeah. The attraction of the Zip disk was that you could write to them without spending $1000. It provided a way to move files bigger than 1.44 MB around in a time when the only other way that most people had access to was a zip file split across a stack of floppies.

are you talking about the jingle-dangly memory frobby?

not so fast dittolet

Attached: Iomega-Clik-Disks.jpg (577x470, 91K)

>iomega dik

OTOH, the zip drive units still cost $200 or more and the discs were like $20 each. If you were poor like me, you were still stuck with floppies. Plus, zip drives were never common enough to necessarily be able to rely on your destination having one (so then you're stuck lugging the drive around with you). It definitely would have been nice to have for some things, but I still managed to fit whole PowerPoint presentations on a single floppy ca. 2000.

Yeah, I remember. It sucked. I mostly used them for local data backups because nobody else had a Zip drive. The disks cost more than early CD-R discs once those were common enough to appear at stores, but could be written over and over, and files could be edited and saved directly back to the disk.

CD-RW was super annoying when it came out. Not only did the discs cost a lot, but you had to erase the whole disc and re-burn everything to change one file. The erase process took a long time, burning took longer than CD-R, and to make things worse the discs always seemed to die after about 5 erase cycles. I quickly concluded it was more economical to buy a big stack of CD-R and chuck them after one use.

> I quickly concluded it was more economical to buy a big stack of CD-R and chuck them after one use.
Yeah, in my experience, that's really remained true even for DVD±R versus DVD±RW, even with the multi-session capability that CD-RW lacked (plus with flash drives there's far better options now for rewritable media than optical).

I think you mean
Universal Serial Bus flash storage device

I think you mean thumb drive.

>relatively as cheap to manufacture as floppy disks
>stored far more data than a floppy disk in nearly the same form factor
>drive and media both far more affordable than hard disk cartridges
>storage capacity still comparable to low-end disk cartridges
>widespread OEM adoption made them relatively universal
Zip disks are a fucking godsend on any old system. Especially those with no/limited USB support.

Have you never looked into tapes before? Quoting the ideal 50% compression capacity is pretty much the standard on those things.

anal cabbage soup

U wot m8?

It's kind of weird when you look back and realize that there was no universal, cheap medium for RW storage in between 1.44MB floppies and USB flash drives. Zip disks and MiniDisc tried but they weren't universally adopted due to being proprietary, and CD-RW came out too late and too expensive. Also I think CD-RW had longevity issues.

Technical term is "flash memory dongle".

Now I want these

zip was universal option for macintosh though, for about a 4 year time period

I remember my x4 and x8 cd-rom drives, they were slow, and loud.

CD-R drives were expensive, like over 200 dollars expensive you could only write once, and if you didn't have 600~750mb of data to write at once, it was wasted space and CD-Rs weren't cheap.

...

How old are you? The thread

I found a couple of these drives at a thrift shop not too long ago

Attached: Zip Drives.jpg (2592x1456, 1.53M)