Theory- 46:- Zip drive, Tape Drive

Zip drive

The Zip drive is a medium‐capacity removable floppy disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Originally, Zip disks launched with capacities of 100 MB, but later versions increased this to first 250 MB and then 750 MB.

A Zip drive is a removable, magnetic disk storage system for computers. Introduced in the mid‐1990s it provided much more storage capacity than floppy disks. By the early 2000s Zip drives became largely obsolete with the advance of USB flash drives, recordable CDs and external hard disks.

Introduction

In the early 1990s, the 3 inch‐floppy disk was the most widely used removable storage system for personal computers; however, a typical floppy could not store more than about 2 MB of data. That is really small by today's standards ‐ you could not even fit a single MP3 song on a floppy. Even at the time, many computer users had a need for larger removable storage. In 1994, the company Iomega introduced the first Zip drive. Much sturdier than the 3‐inch floppy, it had a storage capacity of 100 MB. This represented a breakthrough for removable storage, and Zip drives quickly became very popular.

How a Zip Drive Works

A Zip drive system consists of a disk drive with a slot for a Zip disk and the Zip disk itself, also referred to as a Zip cartridge. A Zip disk is about the same size as a 3 􀳦 inch floppy, but much thicker. The plastic casing is also much stronger. The actual disk itself relies on magnetic storage, much like hard disks and floppy disks.

ZIP disk with a storage capacity of 100 MB

When the first Zip disk with a storage capacity of 100 MB was introduced, it represented a very good alternative for computer users who needed more removable storage than floppy disks could provide. In addition to a larger storage capacity, the Zip drive had several other advantages. The data transfer rate (or how fast data can be moved between the disk and the computer's internal storage) was higher. The seek time (the time it takes to find a particular location on the disk to read or write data) was much faster. And, the disks themselves were much stronger and less vulnerable to damage.

There are two types of Zip disk drives: internal and external. An internal drive is installed inside the actual computer case, similar to how an optical drive (CD/DVD) is installed. The drive is directly connected to the motherboard of the computer, and the drive itself cannot easily be removed.

Internal Zip drive

An external drive has its own separate casing and connects to the computer using a separate connector cable. Earlier models used a parallel port connection, while later models used a USB connection. Drives with a parallel port connection also needed their own power supply.

External zip drive

Zip disks work in both types of drives.

The Rise and Fall of the Zip Drive

After its introduction, the Zip drive quickly became very popular. The storage capacity was greater than that of a floppy disk and the cost per unit of storage was lower than that of hard disk drives. Iomega also released larger capacity disks of 250 MB and 750 MB. Several computer manufacturers started putting internal Zip drives into

A Tape Drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and a long archival stability.

A device, like a tape recorder, that reads data from and writes it onto a tape. Tape drives have data capacities of anywhere from a few hundred kilobytes to several gigabytes. Their transfer speeds also vary considerably. Fast tape drives can transfer as much as 20MB (megabytes) per second.

The disadvantage of tape drives is that they are sequential‐access devices, which means that to read any particular block of data, you need to read all the preceding blocks. This makes them much too slow for general purpose storage operations. However, they are the least expensive media for making backups.