The Zip100 Drive
The Zip100 Drive has been made in numerous variants, including internal ATAPI/IDE and SCSI models and external parallel port, SCSI, and USB models. Iomega once produced the Zip Plus model, which had both SCSI and parallel port interfaces, but that model is no longer made. In addition to the standard internal models, Iomega produces several specialized internal IDE units designed to fit particular notebook systems. Various third-party manufacturers have produced internal and PC Card models for specific notebook computers.
Unfortunately, Zip Drives cannot read, write, or boot from standard 3.5-inch 720 KB or 1.44 MB floppy disks, which makes it impractical to use them as the sole floppy drive in most systems. Zip100 drives use a 3.5-inch disk cartridge that’s about twice as thick as a standard 3.5-inch floppy diskette and stores a nominal 100 MB. Zip100 disks can be read and written by Zip100 and Zip250 drives, but Zip100 drives can use only Zip100 disks. The Zip750 Drive can read Zip100 disks, but not write them.
Tip
Some (but by no means all) recent computers and motherboards explicitly support the Zip Drive in BIOS Setup. On such systems, you can enable an ATAPI/IDE Zip Drive as a boot device. If you do so, you need not install a standard FDD in that system unless you need compatibility with standard floppy disks.
Like standard floppy disks, Zip disks must be formatted before data can be stored on them, although preformatted Zip disks are readily available. You can ...