The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was announced by Iomega in 1994 and began shipping in March 1995.

The format became the most popular of the superfloppy products which filled a niche in the late 1990s portable storage market.

The Zip brand later covered internal and external CD writers known as Zip-650 or Zip-CD, despite the dissimilar technology.

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.

[citation needed] Zip drives initially sold well after their shipments began in 1995, owing to their low price and high (for the time) capacity.

Zip drives also made significant inroads in the graphic arts market, as a cheaper alternative to the Syquest cartridge hard disk system.

[12] Nonetheless, in 2007, PC World rated the Zip drive as the 23rd best technology product of all time[13] despite its known problems.

Zip drives are still used today by retro-computing enthusiasts as a means to transfer large amounts (compared to the retro hardware) of data between modern and older computer systems.

The Commodore-Amiga, Atari ST, Apple II, and "old world" Macintosh communities often use drives with the SCSI interface prevalent on those platforms.

They have also found a small niche in the music production community, as SCSI-compatible Zip drives can be used with vintage samplers and keyboards of the 1990s.

[15][16] Iomega also produced a line of internal and external recordable CD drives under the Zip brand in the late 1990s, called the ZipCD 650.