Zip Drives, Back-Ups, etc.

Zip drives are really nothing else but modern floppy drives. The only reason they are not called floppy drives is because conventional floppy drives can be found in just about every computer system of any kind all over the world. But just as all other components within a computer system have evolved throughout the years, floppy drives have also kept up with time. Today's floppy drive standards are somewhat divided, but only because as of today there is no new standard to obey. The most popular modern floppy drive is manufactured by 'Iomega' and goes under the name of 'Zip drive'. They are available as external, as well as internal devices.

With about the same physical proportions as a floppy disk (slightly larger) they can hold up to 250MB of data. Zip disk are available from around £7.50 and can be compressed just as any other drive. The big benefit of Zip drives is that you can run programs directly from them, especially from the faster SCSI Zip drives. This is because Zip drives do not connect to the computer system as conventional floppy drives, but as IDE or SCSI devices. In the hard drive section I have already mentioned the differences between IDE and SCSI. Unlike conventional floppy drives, today's Zip drives are so fast that you can install fully featured applications on them and run them directly from the Zip disk. Almost all BIOSes are now able to boot directly from the Zip disk of your choice and files are backed up quickly and reliably. Zip drive technology is not much different from that of the conventional 1.44MB floppy drive. It just stores the data in a more compact format with much tighter clusters and it is, of course, much faster. Zip drives are still the most popular backup devices and have been well received all over the world.

Other 3.5" floppy drives

There are other promising technologies other than Zip drives. Most famous for its appearance and almost immediate disappearance again is the 'Sony HIFD', a 150MB floppy disk drive which, for the first time not only offered acceptable speed and storage capabilities, but more importantly 100 percent backwards compatibility with conventional floppy disks. Unfortunately the Sony HIFD developed rather harsh read/write crashes and was therefore withdrawn from the market. The last word, however, is still to be spoken. If anything, Sony's reputation as a world leading corporation has taught us that they will be reckoned with. Watch this space!

Tape Backup Drives

Tape backup drives are still in heavy use where speed is of no importance. In contrast with any other backup and storage medium you might have come across, tape drives are sequential storage devices in that the data con only be read from the beginning of the tape to the end, because you cannot just start reading a reel of tape half way through. Therefore it can take a long while, by today's standards, until you might find the information that you are looking for. However, tape backup devices are cheap and still do their job. With new technologies emerging all the time though, tape backups are slowly becoming a thing of the past, especially with DVD standards finally coming together.