Where I was it went from 3.5" floppies to USB drives. (There were CDs, but not as easy for things like schoolwork.)
ZIP needed a whole ecosystem of drives, so did you have that?
A friend of mine did. He used a lot of video-stuff, so that was his way of archiving.
The drive died with the infamour click of death after a couple of years of use.
Nope, because the actual drive wasn’t commonly supported. I went to Best Buy and spent $65 (in 1990’s money) on a 64MB thumb drive and thought that was mind-blowingly huge. I was like “well this will last me forever!”.
“well this will last me forever!”
Same exact thing we said when we got our Atari 800 up to 64K of memory.
I had a SCSI Zip drive, then later a USB version. Didn’t really need it for myself too much but it helped out for the rare times someone needed to give me something on that format or when I was helping someone with data recovery/data transfer.
Also used to see them around in computer labs & such so they weren’t that rare.
Yeah, but they were rarely used. Pretty much went straight from floppies to burning CDs at my house.
I have one still. The 124mb one I think. Its how I load samples onto my old Emu e5000 rack sampler. Havent used it in years though. Hopefully it still works.
I had a zip drive, jaz drive and a super disk 120mb 3.5" floppy drive at one point.
There were some audio recording devices (think 4 and 8 track recorders [not the 8-track players of the 1970s]) that used internal 100MB Zip drives for storage.
The sound of the “Click of Death” still haunts me.
We had Jazz drives too, which just failed and caused you to lose a larger amount of data than a zip.
Yeah it was like an accidental physical computer virus of sorts. Crazy how it was contagious.
I had both the 100M ZIP drives (one internal, one external) as well as the 1G JAZZ drive back in the times. Not work or study, they were mine.
- most people did the floppy / USB drive path
- but if you were in a field that needed more storage, then it became the floppy / SyQuest / ZIP / USB drive path
- SyQuest disks (and drives) were a serious pain in the ass, temperamental and flaky as hell …
My dad used to pirate games and software for us off BBSes. I swear, he would download everything he could find and put it on zip drives. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he’s got a drawer somewhere filled with all the best software 1995 had to offer.
I’d be surprised if the data was still readable. Thrilled to hear, but surprised.
They may fare better than conventional 1.44mb, but I’ve had a hell of a time getting anything before then mid 2000s to read recently.
Magnetic media and writable CDs are pretty damn perishable.
Depends on data density. Still got a c64 with a whole box of 5 1/4" floppy disks. Last time I checked every one I tried worked fine, and they were written about 33 years ago.
Yep. I’ve used 5 1/4s, 3.5s, Zip, CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVDs, DVD-Rs, DVD-RWs, BD, BD-R, BD-RW, Thumb/Flash, SD, Micro SD, and CF. The only one I can think of that I never personally used were Tapes, but I know people who did. They kind of came and went in a hurry it felt like to me.
Same for me, but add:
- the big ass 8” floppies
- Jaz drives
- Bernoulli drives
So many Bernoulli’s
I had never heard of those until now. 5 1/4 disk size with 230 mb sounds pretty sweet
What about optilithic data rods?
One of the weirder ones was Orb drives/disks.
I still have this and a zip drive in a box. I’d probably need to see if the USB to serial adapter I have works with it though.
I had a cassette drive on my TI 99/4a.
Now get off my lawn!
I don’t even have a lawn but they need to get off the lawn still!
I use LTO8 tapes every day in 2024 lol
My first computer, a Commodore 64, was purchased with a tape drive because we were too broke for a 1541 5.25" disk drive.
I could start a game loading, go eat dinner, come back and it would just be getting around to being done loading.
While in audio engineering school we used all sorts of obscure data storage types, zip being one. Most were DAT tapes and digital reels (2-track, 8, 16, and 24+) with quality that would make FLAC lovers jealous, CDs were used but only for our own personal copies. We also used analog reels. We were made to learn the basics first before moving into computer audio. Fun times.
Yes the school district I was in for elementary thru high school really bought into ZIP and SuperDisk (I think that was the other one) for a brief perios… Boy was that 100mb a big deal back then. This would have been around 2000
I tried them, they never seemed quite reliable enough. We used DAT tapes, CR-ROMs, and then just hard drives. At first hard drives in external enclosures then HD docks with bare drives.
