Zip Drives

Zip drives use a proprietary 3 1/2'' disk made by Iomega and also sold by other major media vendors, such as

Maxell, Verbatim, and Fuji. It is about twice as thick as a standard 3 1/2'' floppy disk or SuperDisk.

 The Zip 100MB disk (right) compared to the standard 3 1/2'' 1.44MB disk (middle) and the

LS-120 SuperDisk (left). The Zip disk is thicker, has a tapered top, and has a much narrower shutter than

either the LS-120 or 1.44MB disk.

The Zip drives do not accept standard 1.44MB or 720KB floppy disks, making them unlikely candidates

for a floppy disk drive replacement. Internal Zip drives have become popular options in new PCs, and

the external models are an effective solution for exchanging data between systems.
Tip
Recent systems support the Zip drive in their BIOS setup programs, which enables you to use the ATA version as a boot drive

Table 1 Zip Specifications

Formatted Capacity 100MB

Model (Interface) ATA USB PC Card Parallel SCSI

Sustained transfer 1.4MBps 1.2MBps 1.4MBps 1.4MBps 1.4MBps

rate max.

Average seek time 29ms 29ms 29ms 29ms 29ms

Formatted Capacity 250MB

USB + USB + PC

IEEE1394a Card

Model (Interface) ATA USB Adapter Adapter Parallel SCSI

Sustained transfer 2.4MBps

1 900KBps2 2.3MBps2 900KBps 800KBps3 2.4MBps4

rate max.

Average seek time 29ms <50ms <40ms <40ms 29ms 29ms

Formatted Capacity 750MB

Model (Interface) ATA USB 1.1 USB 2.0 IEEE-1394a

Sustained transfer 7.5MBps

5 900KBps5,6 7.5MBps5 7.5MBps5

rate max.

Typical throughput N/A N/A N/A N/A

Average seek time 29ms 29ms 29ms 29ms

1. Performance when 250MB Zip media is used. With 100MB Zip media, read performance is 1.4MBps and write performance.

2. Performance when 250MB Zip media is used. With 100MB Zip media, read and write performance is significantly slower.

3. Performance when 250MB Zip media is used. With 100MB Zip media, read and write performance is considerably

slower, varying with parallel port configuration. For the fastest performance with any type of media, use EPP or ECP/EPP

parallel-port modes.

4. Performance when 250MB Zip media is used. With 100MB Zip media, read performance is 1.7MBps and write performance

is 200KBps.

5. Performance when 750MB Zip media is used. Performance is slower when reading/writing 250MB media or when reading

100MB media.

6. Performance when connecting a USB 2.0 drive to a USB 1.1; there is no version of this drive made especially for the USB

1.1 port.