Item — HN Reader

It was flash, however, that I think killed the Zip drive. Primarily in the form of USB sticks, CF, and SD cards. The digital camera played a big role, as these manufacturers were looking for photo storage solutions and the Zip was too big.

Iomega was working on the smaller Clik Drive but couldn't get it released before CF became the major player in cameras.

My personal feeling is that the Clik drive was not released because Iomega had just settled the "Click of Death" suit and they wanted the Clik Drive to have a very low, less than 1%, failure rate. It took around two years to bring the failure rate from around 1.5% to 1%.

The Zip drive did that reduction work while still shipping product.

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I remember there being a few years from like 2002 to 2004 where it was clear Zip wasn't the answer (mostly because nobody had a Zip drive) but flash memory was too expensive.

Emailing files to yourself and Multi-sesion CD-Rs were popular for two or three years before suddenly everyone had USB drives.

Those early flash drives were so damn tiny. I still have a 128MB drive from when that was pretty impressive.

Those rewritable CDRs never worked that well. The price of regular CDR blanks dropped so hard that it was easier to burn a new disc each time.

My first drive was just 16MB; It was so useful.

And I never successfully used a rewritable CD, something always seemed to go wrong. I wasn't quite rich enough to burn a fresh disk each time, instead I would append new files to regular CDRs until it was full or I lost it.