Įarly-generation Zip drives were in direct competition with the SuperDisk or LS-120 drives, which hold 20% more data and can also read standard 3 + 1⁄ 2-inch 1.44 MB diskettes, but they have a lower data-transfer rate due to lower rotational speed. Typical desktop hard disk drives from mid-to-late 1990s revolve at 5,400 rpm and have transfer rates from 3 MB/s to 10 MB/s or more, and average seek times from 20 ms to 14 ms or less. The original Zip drive has a maximum data transfer rate of about 1.4 MB/s (comparable to 8× CD-R although some connection methods are slower, down to approximately 50 kB/s for maximum-compatibility parallel "nibble" mode) and a seek time of 28 ms on average, compared to a standard 1.44 MB floppy's effective ≈16 kB/s and ≈200 ms average seek time.
The Zip disk uses smaller media (about the size of a 9 cm ( 3 + 1⁄ 2-inch) microfloppy. A linear actuator uses the voice coil actuation technology related to modern hard disk drives. In the Zip drive, the heads fly in a manner similar to a hard disk drive. However, Zip disk housings are similar to but slightly larger than those of standard 3½-inch floppy disks. The Zip drive is a "superfloppy" disk drive that has all of the standard 3 + 1⁄ 2-inch floppy drive's convenience, but with much greater capacity options and with performance that is much improved over a standard floppy drive. The Zip brand later covered internal and external CD writers known as Zip-650 or Zip-CD, despite the dissimilar technology. Zip drives fell out of favor for mass portable storage during the early 2000s as CD-RW and USB flash drives became prevalent. However, it was never popular enough to replace the standard 3 + 1⁄ 2-inch floppy disk.
The format became the most popular of the superfloppy products which filled a niche in the late 1990s portable storage market. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 250 MB, and finally 750 MB. The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was announced by Iomega in 1994 and began shipping in March 1995. An internal Zip drive installed in a computer An internal Zip drive outside of a computer but attached to a 3 + 1⁄ 2-inch to 5 + 1⁄ 4-inch drive bay adapter The Zip disk media The back of a parallel-port ZIP-100 with printer pass-through