Typical desktop hard disk drives from mid-to-late 1990s revolve at 5,400 rpm and have transfer rates from 3 MB/s to 10 MB/s or more, and average seek times from 20 ms to 14 ms or less.

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. The Zip disk uses smaller media (about the size of a 9 cm ( 3 + 1⁄ 2-inch) microfloppy, but more ruggedised, rather than the Compact Disc-sized Bernoulli media), and a simplified drive design that reduced its overall cost. A linear actuator uses the voice coil actuation technology related to modern hard disk drives. In the Zip drive, the heads fly in a manner similar to a hard disk drive. However, Zip disk housings are much thicker than those of floppy disks. The Zip drive is a 'superfloppy' disk drive that has all of the 3 + 1⁄ 2-inch floppy drive's convenience, but with much greater capacity options and with performance that is much improved over a standard floppy drive. The Zip brand later covered internal and external CD writers known as Zip-650 or Zip-CD, despite the dissimilar technology.

Zip drives fell out of favor for mass portable storage during the early 2000s as CD-RW and USB flash drives became prevalent. However, it was never popular enough to replace the 3 + 1⁄ 2-inch floppy disk. The format became the most popular of the superfloppy products which filled a niche in the late 1990s portable storage market. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 250 MB, and finally 750 MB. The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Back of the ZIP-100 with parallel port printer pass-through

Zip driver