Greetings everyone!

It would seem that only a lazy person did not write about iOmega ZIP drives. Even here on Habra there were several articles devoted to this in every sense ambiguous format. But such a reason also fell into my hands, and I thought: why not touch this technology? Especially since I have something to add to previous reviews.

So, in today’s article we will talk about iOmega ZIP – an information carrier that combines the disadvantages of floppy disks and hard disks. Let’s find out how such devices are arranged and work and see what they can do. Traditionally, there will be a lot of interesting things.

❯ The point is this

A long time ago, I already wrote about

my avatar in Telegrammagneto-optical disks

. But it was a standard aimed at corporate users. Now let’s talk about what was offered to ordinary users who did not have enough space for ordinary diskettes. Immediately together with the MO-drive, I received the ZIP, but at first I did not think to write about it, thinking that everything was already told to me. But after reading the reviews, I realized that I have something to show.

❯ Equipment overview

Usually, in reviews of ZIPs, LPT versions appear, which require a special driver to work and have an absolutely insane speed of hundreds of kilobytes per second. I got a much cooler copy that connects via the IDE interface. So, it’s time to talk about him.

And here is the test subject. White muzzle with disc slot and eject button combined with green indicator.

On top is a sticker with the model name and jumper table.

On the back are IDE and power connectors, as well as traditional ATA jumpers. A small opening serves for emergency removal of media in the absence of power. Nothing interesting from below.

Diskette. They were delivered in individual plastic boxes that protected them from life’s upheavals.

The disc itself. My copy is one hundred megabytes.

On the back is the spindle and Plexiglas insert, which is detected by the photo sensor in the drive.

❯ How ZIP works

It’s time to talk about the most interesting thing – how such drives are arranged and how they work. Many people consider ZIPs to be some kind of fat diskettes, but in fact, these media have come a long way from them.

Let’s analyze our instance. There is no need to unscrew any screws, the cover is held on the latches.

Internally, it looks a lot like a disk drive, but that’s only at first glance.

If you remove the small metal cover, you can see the block of heads (WARNING! Disassembling the block of heads will lead to its deterioration. It is unlikely that it will be possible to assemble it back with the same tolerances at home. Therefore, I took the next few photos from the Internet). And this is where the main difference between this thing and a regular diskette drive becomes clear. This device is inherently much closer to hard drives. If the floppy drive uses a conventional stepper with a worm shaft to move the heads, then the drive is linear electromagnetic, similar to what we encountered in the magneto-optical drive. The heads themselves are also similar to those in HDD: they have an identical suspension, as well as a chip amplifier, which is not typical for floppy disks, but is completely familiar for hard disks.

Interestingly, at the dawn of hard drives in PCs, they also used a linear head drive. In the photo, Seagate ST-506, which uses a stepper motor, but electromagnetic ones also existed.

Close up of the head. They are surprisingly similar to those used in ancient HDDs.

For comparison, I found a BMG from a dead Seagate ST-157A hard drive in the generous bins of the Motherland (don’t worry about its fate – this copy had a missing board and also had dents on the pancakes, which is why I disassembled it).

And here are his heads, very similar to those we saw in ZIP.

Internally, the medium is very similar to a regular floppy disk, but of course it also has a number of differences. The most noticeable thing is that the heads enter the inside of the case, and do not fit on the sides, as is done in a conventional disk drive. It is for this reason that the disc eject button is electronic: if it were mechanical, accidentally pressing it when the heads were next to a disc rotating at high speed would inevitably lead to the death of the disc drive.

The second difference lies in the metal insert, which is mounted on the spindle. If you look at a regular floppy disk, you can see another hole not in the center. It is not needed to improve the connection between the spindle and the disk – directly opposite this hole is the zero sector.

Yes, with the amount of ancient iron that I have, for some reason I did not find a disassembled floppy disk, I threw out or disassembled all the dead specimens many years ago. That’s why I just took a photo from space.

When a diskette is inserted, the drive can determine the position of that sector. Usually, a small magnet on the spindle and a Hall sensor on the board are used for this, which is activated when the zero sector passes over the heads.

In five-inch diskettes, an index hole was used for this, which was read by an optical sensor located next to the spindle in the disk drive.

There is no such thing in ZIP. Instead, four synchronizations (Z-tracks) are used here — the first two tracks on each of the two sides of the disk, which contain the servo labels, the serial number of the disk, its volume and the table of bad blocks. At the moment of media insertion, the drive first of all reads them, if it is not successful, it moves to the next one, if even at this moment the reading is unsuccessful, then the second side is selected. If no track is read, the drive pushes out the heads and tries again. Thus, if half-dead diskettes could sometimes be restored by erasing with a powerful magnet and subsequent formatting, then the influence of the magnetic field will lead to disk damage. Only low-level formatting, which cannot be done on a regular drive, can bring it back to life.

Each side of the disc contains 1817 tracks, divided into four zones with different numbers of tracks and sectors per track. There are also forty spare tracks on each side that serve to reassign bid blocks.

Structural diagram of the device from the patent for it. It is very similar to that of a standard HDD.

❯ Let’s start

So, the working principle has been figured out. It’s time to try to turn it on.

For tests, we will use the same machine on Windows XP based on AMD Athlon 64, which has already appeared in a number of my posts. Unlike LPT drives, here we will practically not be limited by the port speed.

In the BIOS, the device is defined as a regular disk drive. In fact, this is what it is: you can boot from it, you can format it to any general-purpose FS such as FAT or NTFS. Everything is the same as on a regular screw.

In “My Computer” it is an ordinary “removable disk”, nothing remarkable.

And so the device is visible in the device manager. After loading the OS, it is immediately ready to work, no drivers are required.

A test file of fifty megabytes was copied in a very acceptable forty seconds. A good result when compared with the LPT drive.

The drive uses magnetic recording technology, so the reading speed is almost identical to the writing speed, there is no big difference, as in magneto-optical drives. The measured value corresponds almost perfectly with the 1.4 MB/s declared in the documentation for the original ZIP. For the ZIP-250 and ZIP-750 drives, the speeds are higher, but there is a nuance: discs of a smaller volume were written at a speed that corresponds to the speed of the drive for which these volumes were “native”. For example, ZIP-250 worked at a speed of 2.4 MB/s, was able to write ZIP-100 disks, but it was produced at the standard speed of 1.4 MB/s for such a volume.

Copying a folder of similar size with a bunch of PDFs took ten seconds longer both ways. During all operations, no glitches such as inexplicable hangs were noticed, as was the case when working with MO. I have a guess that there was a lot of CPU load when accessing the SCSI controller, but I could be wrong.

❯ And what if you connect via USB?

Of course, ZIP drives with a USB interface existed, but it was the slow USB of the first version. Due to the lack of such a drive, I tried to connect the device to the computer through a USB-IDE adapter. Unfortunately, none of the copies I have (Agestar and some unknown Chinese device) could accept this reason: when connected to the computer in the device manager, only the adapter was detected, there was no ZIP.

❯ A fatal flaw

In the end, I will touch on probably the main reason why ZIP failed: high price coupled with terribly low reliability (the same infamous “clicks of death”).

Many people know such a defect of HDD as “dusting” – in the event of an impact, a sudden power cut or dust, the heads fall and scratch the disk. It is easy to guess that, considering the design similar to a hard disk, ZIP was prone to a similar phenomenon. Only if the aluminum or glass pancake was scratched, the film disc simply tore to pieces. You didn’t have to bang the drive on a table or keep it in a hot bedroom to fail: the ZIP wasn’t airtight at all and didn’t have any filters or dust collectors like HDDs, so it was only a matter of time before dust got inside that could make it fail . Of course, some measures were taken to clean the heads, but that piece of felt on which the heads are wiped when returning to the parking lot did not help much. The bonus was that the malfunction spread virally: a dead floppy disk killed the drive, and it began to corrupt all the disks inserted into it.

And yet there are several ways to delay the death of the drive:

• Before inserting discs of unknown origin, move the curtain, rotate the disc and make sure that its edge is even. If it has scratches or gouges on it, such a disc should be discarded.
• After finishing writing or reading, immediately remove the disc from the drive, not allowing it to spin idle and suck dust into the case.
• Store discs only in the regular plastic box to protect them from dust getting inside.
• Do not use ZIP for backup, only for transferring data between multiple computers.

Even from this description, it is clear how sensitive these drives were to life’s shocks. This became almost the main reason why ZIP and all its successors that use similar technology (SyQuest, iOmega JAZ, REV, Clik) ​​went down in history.

❯ That’s how it is

Unfortunately, despite the interesting design, discs of this format did not catch on. Drives and media were very expensive and unreliable, and they were not widely available (why couldn’t you come to someone with a pack of ZIPs instead of a pack of floppies). Now they have gone down in history forever, causing a lot of problems for owners of old synthesizers, where in some models they were used as carriers.

In addition to ZIP, iOmega managed to release several other interesting media formats. But I plan to talk about this in separate posts.

Such cases.

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