The PocketZip is a medium-capacity

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

storage system that was made by

Iomega Iomega (later LenovoEMC) produced external, portable, and networked data storage products. Established in the 1980s in Roy, Utah, United States, Iomega sold more than 410 million digital storage drives and disks, including the Zip drive floppy d ...

in 1999 that uses proprietary, small, very thin, 40 MB disks. Its relation to the original Zip drive and disk is the floppy medium and relatively much higher capacity than standard floppy disks. It was known as the "Clik!" drive until the

click of death Click of death is a term that had become common in the late 1990s referring to the clicking sound in disk storage systems that signals a disk drive has failed, often catastrophically. The clicking sound itself arises from the unexpected movemen ...

class action lawsuit regarding mass failures of Iomega's Zip drives. Thenceforth, it was renamed to PocketZip. A 100 MB Pocket Zip drive version had been in the works, was intended to be backwards compatible with the 40 MB disks, but ended up being

vaporware In the computer industry, vaporware (or vapourware) is a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is late or never actually manufactured nor officially cancelled. Use of the word has broade ...

and PocketZip itself would be discontinued as well.

PocketZip drive and media

The PocketZip drive was available originally as a laptop

PC card In computing, PC Card is a configuration for computer parallel communication peripheral interface, designed for laptop computers. Originally introduced as PCMCIA, the PC Card standard as well as its successors like CardBus were defined and devel ...

(PCMCIA) slot drive where it could compete with contemporary

MicroDrive The Microdrive is a registered trademark for miniature, 1-inch hard disks produced by IBM and Hitachi. These rotational media storage devices were designed to fit in CompactFlash (CF) Type II slots. The release of similar drives by other ...

CompactFlash CompactFlash (CF) is a flash memory mass storage device used mainly in portable electronic devices. The format was specified and the devices were first manufactured by SanDisk in 1994. CompactFlash became one of the most successful of the e ...

and

SmartMedia SmartMedia is an obsolete flash memory, flash memory card standard owned by Toshiba, with capacities ranging from 2 MB to 128 MB. The format mostly saw application in the early 2000s in digital cameras and audio production. SmartMedia m ...

readers. A dock was available to connect this drive to a desktop computer's parallel port. Later, a USB version of the drive was also offered. It was marketed as a backup and portable storage solution, similar to the original Zip drive, but which could be installed completely inside a laptop computer, as PC cards typically slide completely inside the laptop computer and thus do not increase its dimensions, which also precludes the need for a power supply or cables. The PocketZip media is a small, flexible disk inside of a thin metal casing, similar to that found on the shutter of a standard floppy disk. The disks usually came in small format-specific plastic cases, and the drive was also shipped for a while with a small hard metal case - identical, but unrelated to the Aluma Wallet - which could house the drive and two disks. The disks could be bent easily if too much force was applied, thereby completely damaging them.

Use in consumer electronics

The format was also used in a small number of consumer electronics devices such as

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

players and digital cameras. These include the Iomega HipZip Digital Audio Player, the Sensory Science Rave MP 2300, and the Agfa ePhoto CL30 Clik. The format saw use in other devices as well but proved to be a commercial failure. It suffered heavy competition from flash-based

memory cards A memory card is an electronic data storage device used for storing digital information, typically using flash memory. These are commonly used in digital portable electronic devices. They allow adding memory to such devices using a card in a soc ...

. The PocketZip was electro-mechanical and, hence, not as reliable as solid-state flash memory cards which have no moving parts. Also, as the capacity and speed of flash memory storage increased and its costs decreased, the PocketZip lost viability as a portable storage solution.

Specifications

(fro
Iomega support site
: *Capacity: 40 MByte *Seek Time: 38 ms *Sustained transfer rate: Up to 600 kByte/s *Rotational speed: 2,941 rpm *Short format time: 10 seconds *Long format time: 5 minutes *Average start/stop time: 3 seconds *Disk shelf life: 10 years

Operating system support

According to the original documentation, Pocket Zip USB and PC Card work with

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...

Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released to ...

/98SE and

Windows NT 4.0 Windows NT 4.0 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 3.51, which was released to manufacturing on July 31, 1996, and then to retail ...

. Iomega provided USB mass storage support for Windows 95 with at least OSR2 (4.00.950B) for use with its Zip products. Under Windows NT 4, Pocket Zip PC Card only works with certain PC Card controllers (which ones are not named by Iomega). Pocket Zip USB also works with Mac OS 8.x, but the PC card version is specified as not working with Apple computers. In practice, the USB drive is a standard mass storage device, so it will also work on any modern operating system which can use such devices, including Windows XP, Vista and 7, Mac OS X and Linux. The PC card drive, similarly, is a standard removable ATA device, so it also will typically function without any problems on modern operating systems including Windows XP. The problem on the latest operating systems is unavailability or incompatibility of the software used to operate the proprietary features of the drive, such as low-level formatting and the software write protection.

Devices that use the PocketZip format

*PocketZip PC Card Drive *PocketZip USB Drive *HipZip Digital Audio Player (Iomega-branded MP3 player) *Sensory Science Rave MP 2300 (MP3 player with voice recording and minimal PIM viewer functionality) *

Agfa ePhoto CL30 Clik! Agfa produced a number of mostly consumer-oriented digital cameras from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. *Agfa StudioCam (1995) (professional digital camera, first ever to be produced and sold in quantity) *Agfa ActionCam (1995) (Professional/pro ...

(Digital camera which uses PocketZip media for storage)

References

External links

Iomega Press Release about 100MB PocketZipWindows NT 4.0 support info
(Microsoft article ID 195540)