You see a zip drive in the store and you think wow, 100 extra megabytes per disk that I can bring anywhere! But think twice, you may end up making a big mistake.

My experience with the zip drives
Back in 1997 when I bought my computer it came with a 100-megabyte zip drive. I was happy thinking that I could take stuff off my computer and give it to my friends. After finding out that buying a zip drive in 1997 was very expensive, I knew my friends wouldn’t be getting one anytime soon. I thought that’s ok I can still put files on the disk so I can have extra space on my hard drive. Well I guess I was right, but I found 1 extra gigabyte of space would be costing me about 300$+ just for the zip disks. They were and still are very expensive. Now I thought what am I going to do with this thing? And there was a simple answer to this question, do nothing with it. After just buying a new computer I didn’t have the money to go out and buy zip disks.

An alternative?
There was an alternative to zip drives, the CD-r drive, but in 1997 those were in the range of $500-1000, and again I didn’t have the money. Now I’m the year 2,000 CD-r drives are re-writeable and the CD-r media (CD’s) cost about 20$ for a pack of 5 good quality CD’s, compared to 50$ for about 3 or 4 zip disks. I am happy that I bought a CD-r, they hold 650 megabytes per CD, and the CD-r drive costs about 200$ for an ok drive. So are you looking for something to store files off of your hard drive? Go for CD-r not zip drives.

Also note that of you are wanting to share files with a zip disk the other person has to have a zip drive.



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