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The Zip system is based loosely on Iomega's earlier Bernoulli Box system; in both systems, a set of read/write heads mounted on a linear actuator flies over a rapidly spinning floppy disk mounted in a sturdy cartridge. The linear actuator uses the voice coil actuation technology, related to modern hard drives. The Zip disk uses smaller media (about the size of a 9 cm (3½") microfloppy, rather than the Compact Disc-sized Bernoulli media), and a simplified drive design that reduced its overall cost. This resulted in a disk that has all of the 9 cm (3½") floppy's convenience, but holds much more data, with performance that is much quicker than a standard floppy drive (though not directly competitive with hard drives). The original Zip drive had a data transfer rate of about 1 megabyte/second and a seek time of 28 milliseconds on average, compared to a standard 1.44 MB floppy's 500 kbit/s (62.5 kB/s) transfer rate and several-hundred millisecond average seek time. Today's average 7200 RPM desktop hard drives have average seek times of around 8.5-9 ms. 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 3½" 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.

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17y ago

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