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The Zip drive is a medium-to-high-capacity removable floppy disk storage system (for its period of contemporary use) 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. The format became the most popular of the superfloppy products which filled a niche in the late 1990s portable storage market. However, it was never popular enough to replace the 3.5-inch floppy disk. Later versions of the disc matched the capacity available on rewritable CDs but this was far surpassed by the later rewritable DVDs. USB flash drives ultimately proved to be the better rewritable storage medium among the general public due to the near-ubiquity of USB ports on personal computers and soon after because of the far greater storage sizes offered. Zip drives fell out of favor for mass portable storage during the early 2000s. The Zip brand later covered internal and external CD writers known as Zip-650 or Zip-CD, which had no relation to the Zip drive. ==Overview== The Zip drive is similar to Iomega's earlier Bernoulli Box in that in both drives, a set of read/write heads mounted on a linear actuator hover over a rapidly spinning flexible medium mounted in a sturdy cartridge. However, the Zip cartridge lacks the Bernoulli plate of the earlier product,〔Radman et al.,, "Flexible-Disk Cartridge Drives Combine Reliable Operation, Removability," Computer Technology Review, Summer 1984, p. 77-81〕 and as a consequence, the Zip cartridge has only one disk in the cartridge in contrast to the two disks in a Bernoulli cartridge (one on either side of the Bernoulli plate). In the Zip drive, the heads fly in a manner similar to a hard disk drive, without the use of the Bernoulli effect. The linear actuator uses the voice coil actuation technology related to modern hard disk drives. The Zip disk uses smaller media (about the size of a 9 cm (3.5") microfloppy, but more ruggedised, rather than the Compact Disc-sized Bernoulli media), and a simplified drive design that reduced its overall cost. This resulted in a superfloppy disk that had all of the 3.5" floppy's convenience, but held much more data, with performance that was much improved over a standard floppy drive (though not directly competitive with hard disk drives). However, Zip disk housings were much thicker than those of floppy disks. The original Zip drive had a maximum data transfer rate of about 1 megabyte/second (comparable to 6× CD-R; although some connection methods were slower, down to approximately 50 kB/second for maximum-compatibility parallel "nibble" mode) and a seek time of 28 milliseconds on average, compared to a standard 1.44 MB floppy's typical 500 kbit/s (62.5 kB/s) transfer rate and several-hundred-millisecond average seek time. Typical desktop hard disk drives from mid-to-late 1990s revolved at 5400 rpm and had transfer rates from 3 MB/s to 10 MB/s or more, and average seek times from 20 ms to 14 ms or less. Early-generation Zip drives were in direct competition with the SuperDisk or LS-120 drives, which held 20% more data and could also read standard 3.5" 1.44 MB diskettes, but they had a lower data-transfer rate due to lower rotational speed. The rivalry was over before the dawn of the USB era. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Zip drive」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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