Zip drive

The Zip drive is a medium-to-high-capacity removable floppy disk storage system (for its period of contemporary use) that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Originally, Zip disks launched with capacities of 100 MB, but later versions increased this to first 250 MB and then 750 MB.

The format became the most popular of the superfloppy products which filled a niche in the late 1990s portable storage market. However, it was never popular enough to replace the 3.5-inch floppy disk. Later versions of the disc matched the capacity available on rewritable CDs but this was far surpassed by the later rewritable DVDs. USB flash drives ultimately proved to be the better rewritable storage medium among the general public due to the near-ubiquity of USB ports on personal computers and soon after because of the far greater storage sizes offered. Zip drives fell out of favor for mass portable storage during the early 2000s. The Zip brand later covered internal and external CD writers known as Zip-650 or Zip-CD, which had no relation to the Zip drive.