Definition: Zip disk

An earlier 3.5" removable disk format from Iomega. When Zip disks came out in 1995 with 100MB cartridges, their huge storage compared to floppy disks made them very popular. However, like all removable media of that era, the Zip was eclipsed by recordable CDs and the Internet.

Storage capacities evolved to 250MB and 750MB in 1998 and 2002 respectively, but the USB and FireWire-based 750MB drives could only read but not write 100MB cartridges. The Zip was a floppy-like technology with design concepts from hard disks and Iomega's earlier Bernoulli disks. The drive's bundled software could lock the files for security. See Bernoulli box.

Zip Cartridge

Zip drives were introduced in 1995 and became very popular for a number of years as a transportable, rewritable storage medium.