#Jaz drive

So, grab your Walkman and let’s rewind some of the most commonly known storage drives of the past. The disk was housed in a protective jacket and inserted into a drive that spun the disk at a constant speed while a read head accessed the data. These disks were commonly used for data backup and storage during the 1990s but became obsolete with the introduction of CD-R discs and USB thumb drives. Zip Drive Introduced by Iomega in 1995, it used a special type of floppy disk, the Zip disk, which had a higher storage capacity than regular floppy disks. [caption id="attachment_340682" align="alignnone" width="1170"] Photo/ Iomega[/caption] Zip Drives were either available as internal or external drives, with a variety of interfaces. Sales declined after 1999 due to the falling cost of CD-R and CD-RW disks, followed by USB flash drives, and the Zip 100 was discontinued in 2004, with the Zip 250 and Zip 750 following suit in 2006. The retroreflective spot on the disks allowed the drive to recognize the capacity of the disk and eject it if it was of a higher capacity than the drive. While it was popular for backup and data transfer purposes, it was eventually replaced by other removable storage solutions such as USB flash drives and external hard drives. Read more in our articles including "Storage Drives of the Past: Do you still remember them?" and "Google Drive is now official!".