Ask Lemmy

My first computer was an old used Mac IIvi that came with a 40mb hard drive. I was so stoked to over double my storage when I got my Zip drive. I still have a disk in a drawer that I can’t possibly get data from.

Yes in 2000 at a major public university we had them in all the computer labs

I think I eventually got into ZIP disks once the price came down a bit, I was only like 12 or 13 at the time, so I didn't have the money to buy it early on.

There were some audio recording devices (think 4 and 8 track recorders [not the 8-track players of the 1970s]) that used internal 100MB Zip drives for storage.

A friend of mine did. He used a lot of video-stuff, so that was his way of archiving.

The drive died with the infamour click of death after a couple of years of use.

I had one at work at one time, and I saved a disc for a long time as a keepsake, but I lost it.

I still have a couple drives and a bunch of disks. I keep telling myself I'll resurrect my college homework for a laugh one day. Unfortunately it's hard to find a reasonably modern motherboard to hook them up (let alone finding drivers), so in the closet they sit.

I had a SparQ drive - I did the sums, and it was the most cost-effective. A whole gigabyte per cartridge! Room for everything! I still have it in a box somewhere. It has some weird old connection... ah, parallel port according to Wikipedia.

The mad thing about it was that the drive malfunctioned a few months after I bought it. I took it back to the retailer and discovered it had been discontinued. But they still had one out the back, so the assistant swapped it for my defective one. Phew! In hindsight I should have asked for a refund. But hey, with two 1Gb cartridges I had enough storage for a lifetime!

I remember the first time my Zip drive started doing the click of death. It would ruin any cartridges you put in it.

I had a CD burner made by Iomega. ;)

I had one (more than one actually) as it could store soooo much more data than a floppy disk and I needed it to move data (and pirated software) around. At work we had magneto-optic drives with a whopping 240 megs of data, IIRC

I junked a Zip drive in a job around 2010. Could not figure any good use for it.

In 1998 I considered putting an internal 120MB Superdisk into my first PC build( A "Damage Box" with a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz and Riva TNT2. Shout out to Claude Damage of Ars fame) Went with a stock 3.5 floppy instead.

I had a SCSI Zip drive, then later a USB version. Didn't really need it for myself too much but it helped out for the rare times someone needed to give me something on that format or when I was helping someone with data recovery/data transfer.

Also used to see them around in computer labs & such so they weren't that rare.

We had to buy our own for high school, about $5 each. They were used for CAD file storage.

Yes the school district I was in for elementary thru high school really bought into ZIP and SuperDisk (I think that was the other one) for a brief perios.. Boy was that 100mb a big deal back then. This would have been around 2000

I had one. I don't remember why though... Maybe it came with a PC as part of a sales promotion?

It worked fine but nobody else had one so it was really just used for backups of "large" (at the time) data.

I asked on a neighborhood Facebook page recently if anyone had a zip drive in the attic I could borrow - no luck. I found a couple of disks at my old family house. Probably porn, I was(am) a horndog.

My dad was a techie who always got cool software and games for his computer, way before I was even born. He still keeps his old stuff in the house.

However, last time I checked, I don't ever remember seeing a Zip disk anywhere in the house. Not even a Zip drive. It was all just floppy disks and CDs.

I wish, I was young and it wasn't cheap. My pc had some alternative, maybe super disk? (it also took floppies) Didn't get any of those disks either.

I owned one of the original external units and later a couple of the 3.5" internal drives. Just tossed some discs and that original drive in the trash 2 years ago

Graduated college in 2007, they were required by some of my graphic design professors

Yeah. All my college computer animation projects were on zip drives. Guess I'll never see those again.

I have one still. The 124mb one I think. Its how I load samples onto my old Emu e5000 rack sampler. Havent used it in years though. Hopefully it still works.

Nope, because the actual drive wasn't commonly supported. I went to Best Buy and spent $65 (in 1990's money) on a 64MB thumb drive and thought that was mind-blowingly huge. I was like "well this will last me forever!".