IEEE 1284 (Parallel Port) with Printer passthrough (Zip 100 MB and 250 MB generations) (See NB 1).USB 2.0 (Zip 750 MB generation backwards compatible with USB 1.1 systems).USB 1.1 (Zip 100 MB and 250 MB generations).
IMATION SUPERDISK LOUD SOFTWARE
IDE True ATA (very early ATA internal Zip drives mostly sold to OEMs these drives exhibit software compatibility issues because they do not support the ATAPI command set).Zip drives are available in multiple interfaces including: Later (USB, left) and earlier (parallel, right) Zip drives (media in foreground). The rivalry was over before the dawn of the USB era.
Typical desktop hard disk drives from mid-to-late 1990s revolved at 5400 rpm and had transfer rates from 3 MB/s to 10 MB/s or more, and average seek times from 20 ms to 14 ms or less.Įarly-generation Zip drives were in direct competition with the SuperDisk or LS-120 drives, which held 20% more data and could also read standard 3½” 1.44 MB diskettes, but they had a lower data-transfer rate due to lower rotational speed. The original Zip drive had a maximum data transfer rate of about 1 megabyte/second (comparable to 6× CD-R although some connection methods were slower, down to approximately 50 kB/second for maximum-compatibility parallel “nibble” mode) and a seek time of 28 milliseconds on average, compared to a standard 1.44 MB floppy’s typical 500 kbit/s (62.5 kB/s) transfer rate and several-hundred-millisecond average seek time. However, Zip disk housings were much thicker than those of floppy disks. This resulted in a superfloppy disk that had all of the 3½” floppy’s convenience, but held much more data, with performance that was much improved over a standard floppy drive (though not directly competitive with hard disk drives). The Zip disk uses smaller media (about the size of a 9 cm (3½”) microfloppy, but more ruggedised, rather than the Compact Disc-sized Bernoulli media), and a simplified drive design that reduced its overall cost. The linear actuator uses the voice coil actuation technology related to modern hard disk drives. In the Zip drive, the heads fly in a manner similar to a hard disk drive, without the use of the Bernoulli effect. However, the Zip cartridge lacks the Bernoulli plate of the earlier product, and as a consequence, the Zip cartridge has only one disk in the cartridge in contrast to the two disks in a Bernoulli cartridge (one on either side of the Bernoulli plate). The Zip drive is similar to Iomega’s earlier Bernoulli Box in that in both drives, a set of read/write heads mounted on a linear actuator hover over a rapidly spinning flexible medium mounted in a sturdy cartridge.