No tape, it was essentially just a high density/capacity floppy drive. Unfortunately for iomega it wasn’t high density enough to compete with CD-R as the price of burners and media dropped.
Comment on They Made a Zip Drive.. for your TV?!
Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 weeks ago
I forgot how zip drives worked… weren’t they basically cassette tapes with magnetic tape? 🤔
espentan@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Tahl_eN@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Zip and Jazz drives had some serious data stability issues that would have sunk them anyway. I used them for school work and needed to have duplicates because it was a question of when the disk would fail, not if.
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
Same with normal floppy disks. Their reliability was abysmal, as was their longevity.
artifex@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
They were basically hard drives where the read and write heads were in the drive itself and the platter was in the zip disc. When it was released it offered 100MB vs the 1.44 you could fit on a similarly sized (but much cheaper) floppy. USB hadn’t even been invented yet, let alone USB thumb drives or SD cards, so it was kinda the only semi-convenient, semi-cheap way to move semi-large amounts of media around. I was a graphic artist when they came out and it was a huge improvement to be able to send a zip disk or two to a printer to print proofs.