Zip drives come of age

Why are floppy disks so popular. There are a few reasons:

1. You can write to a disk on one machine and read it on another.
2. The drives are cheap enough to allow them to be fitted to all PCs in the world.
3. The disks themselves are cheap enough to allow you to pop them into an envelope bung them in the post without worrying too much about what happens to them.

Iomega are hoping that their zip disks are going to take over from floppy disks the world over by capitalising on their biggest drawback - they generally only hold 1.44Mb of data and the world of multimedia needs more.

They have solved the problem of interchangability by using a clever, and well proven, optical tracking system to position the head on the disk without the need for extremely accurate and expensive stepper motors. However, the price is too high. You might argue that £100 for the drive and £10 for a 100Mb disk is pretty good going, but would you fit one as standard and can you consider a £10 disk a throwaway item?

But it looks like Iomega are serious about ousting the floppy. They have announced that there are going to be third-party disk makers (Fuji, for one) and other companies can produce the drives under license. Philips are said to be working on one. With competition the price is bound to come down.

There is no doubt that the cleverly engineered technology in a zip drive can be produced cheaply in quantities. The disks themselves don't contain anything too difficult - though they will always be harder to make than standard floppies.

Several companies have tried to displace the 1.44Mb floppy, including IBM with a 2.88Mb version in 1991. Iomega, with these announcements, is the first one I'd rate as having a reasonable chance.

© 1996 Frank J Leonhardt