The PocketZip is a medium-capacity

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a 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 with a ...

storage system introduced by Iomega in 1999. It uses very small 54.5mm x 50.2mm x 2.0mm 40 MB disks. It was originally 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 moveme ...

class action lawsuit regarding mass failures of Iomega's original Zip drives, after which it was renamed "PocketZip". In 2001, the company announced bigger-capacity 100 MB disks, which were never released.

PocketZip drive and media

The PocketZip drive was available originally as a laptop

PC card PC Card is a technical standard specifying an expansion card interface for laptops and personal digital assistants, PDAs. The PCMCIA originally introduced the 16-bit Industry Standard Architecture, ISA-based PCMCIA Card in 1990, but renamed it to ...

(PCMCIA) slot drive where it could compete with contemporary

, MicroDrive,

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 under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

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. 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 MB *Seek Time: 38 ms *Sustained transfer rate: Up to 600 KB/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 and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

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. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was Software ...

/98SE and Windows NT 4.0. 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! (Digital camera which uses PocketZip media for storage)

References

External links

Windows NT 4.0 support info
(Microsoft article ID 195540) {{Iomega storage devices Iomega storage devices Floppy disk drives Computer-related introductions in 1999