However, as competition began to pop up due to companies creating their versions of the zip drive, the price of the 100 MB zip drive reduced significantly. These interfaces allowed easy communication between the drive and the computer. The zip drive utilized different interfaces, including ATAPI, Plus, IDE, USB 1.1, SCSI, and IEEE 1248. You could insert, remove, transfer and read the data in the zip drive on any computer. At the same time, Iomega also worked on the drive’s data transfer speed. Over the years, the manufacturers increased it to 250 megabytes and then 750 megabytes. The zip drive system came with a drive with a slop where you could fix the zip disk it also came with, which made the drive cost below $200 it was an instant success as people were glad to have a storage device where they could store files too large to be saved on a floppy disk. It was able to hold about 100 MB of information. The first zip drive system was created in 1994 by Iomega. This is common with MS-DOS and Windows used over the years. Note that Windows can read Zip disks formatted with NFTS, FAT, exFAT, or even FAT32 formats. If you want to open the files in the zip drive, follow the steps below.

The zip drives that use a parallel port connection require a separate power supply to be used. While some use a parallel port connection, others utilize a USB connection. On the other hand, the external zip drive comes in a separate casing and connects to the computer using a connector cable. You cannot easily remove it by connecting it to the computer motherboard. Then, you install the internal drive directly inside the computer case like you would with an optical drive. It would help if you connected to the computer to read or write data on the zip drive. Hence, seek time refers to the time it takes to find a location on the disk to write or read data. Data moves fast between the computer’s internal storage and the disk.

Apart from a large storage capacity, a zip drive offers a high data transfer rate. A zip drive system contains a zip disk and slot for the zip disk.

Zip driver