A Zip Drive is a 3.5" removable disk drive manufactured by Iomega. Zip disks come in various memory capacity models such as 100MB, 250MB and 750MB. The 250MB drive was introduced in 1998, and also can perform read and can write only on 100MB disks. The 750MB drives can read all, but only write only on 250MB and 750MB disks. The idea of Zip disks are derived from the floppy technology that uses concepts of design from hard disks. The drive is bundled with software that is used to lock the files for security.

Zip disks were introduced in 1995 and were popularly used. The Zip drive is a medium-capacity removable disk storage system, introduced by Iomega in the year 1994. The Design concept of zip disk is based on Iomega's system; in which both systems have a set of read/write heads mounted over a rapidly spinning floppy disk. The Zip disk uses smaller media generally called as microfloppy, rather than the compact disc sized, and a simplified drive design that reduced its overall cost is formed. This design results in a disk that has an 9 cm floppy convenience, but holds much more data, with performance much more quicker than a standard floppy drive.

The original Zip drive had a data transfer rate of about 1 megabyte/s and the time taken was 28 milliseconds, compared to a standard 1.4 MB floppy of 500 Kbit/s transfer rate and several-hundred millisecond average seek time. The Capacity of Zip system is 100 megabytes. There were plans to construct a lower cost 25MB version that would work in the same 100MB drive and the idea was to bring the price of a zip disk closer to that of an ordinary floppy. But it don't seem to have ever been released. The introduction of the 100 megabyte disk made ZIP a success and people used them to store files of 1.44 MB capacity of regular floppy disks. Iomega eventually increases the capacity to 250 and later 750 megabytes, while improving the data transfer rate and seek times.

Zip media is similar in vertical size as of floppy disks, which means the drive slot is large enough to accept such a floppy to prevent drive and disk damage. Higher capacity Zip disks are used in a drive with at least the same capacity ability. Generally, higher capacity drives also handle lower capacity media, the 250 MB drive is much slower than the 100 MB one to write data on a 100 MB disk. The 750 MB drive cannot write to the 100 MB media but it is cheapest and most common.

The Zip's write protection is implemented on the software level instead of mechanically enforced in the hardware. The metadata on the disk indicates the write protection status, which the software driver then enforces to the operating system. This means that the disk must be loaded in a drive and accessed on a computer to turn write protection on or off. It also means that, in theory, a rogue driver could be created which ignores the write protection flag.

The Zip system also introduced the features such as media access protection through a password. Like write protection, this is also implemented other features such as to trick the software into allowing access to a different disk than it believes to be in the drive, thereby bypassing the password protection. Thus, Zip drives are more or less like a floppy and uses concepts of floppy technology.

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