May 27, 2006
Zip Drive - one of the worst tech products ever?
Recently, PC World had a list of the Top 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. I noticed this entry:
PCWorld.com - The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time
15. Iomega Zip Drive (1998)
Click for enlarged view. Click-click-click. That was the sound of data dying on thousands of Iomega Zip drives. Though Iomega sold tens of millions of Zip and Jaz drives that worked flawlessly, thousands of the drives died mysteriously, issuing a clicking noise as the drive head became misaligned and clipped the edge of the removable media, rendering any data on that disc permanently inaccessible.
Alright… the Click of Death problem was bad. It was really bad. But from what I recalled, it wasn’t until later in the life span of the product that this started to happen. What I do remember was that Zip disks became enormously poular because of how much content it could hold, and the convenience it offered. Suddenly, multimedia was transportable in a rewritable fashion!
I’m sure there could have been a better entry in the Top 25 Worst Tech Product of All Time.
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2 Comments to “Zip Drive - one of the worst tech products ever?”
May 29th, 2006 at 9:08 am
Yeah, I think you’re right Dennis. While the click of death was bad, Zip changed publishing completely for a while, usurping Syquest so totally from the market that the company fell apart.
June 1st, 2006 at 6:46 pm
I have a soft spot for my Zip 100 Parallel. It still sits on my desktop, though with a 1 GB flash drive, there’s simply no use for it. Never had a problem with it, though Iomega clung to its one-trick-pony with a death grip that probably blinded it to tech advancements and caused it to bully competitors of superior products.
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