Zip drives initially sold well after their shipments began in 1995, owing to their low price and high (for the time) capacity. The drive was initially sold for just under US$200 with one cartridge included, and additional 100MB cartridges for US$20. At this time
hard disks typically had a capacity of 500MB and cost around US$200, and so backing up with Zip disks was very economical for home users—some computer suppliers such as
Dell,
Gateway and
Apple Inc. included internal Zip drives in their machines. Zip drives also made significant inroads in the graphic arts market, as a cheaper alternative to the
Syquest cartridge hard disk system. The price of additional cartridges swiftly dropped further over the next few years, as more companies began supplying them. Eventually, the suppliers included
Fujifilm,
Verbatim,
Toshiba and
Maxell,
Epson and
NEC. NEC also produced a licensed 100MB drive model with its brand name. Sales of Zip drives and disks declined steadily from 1999 to 2003. Zip disks had a relatively high cost per megabyte compared to the falling costs of then-new
CD-R and
CD-RW discs. The growth of hard disk drives to multi-gigabyte capacity made backing up with Zip disks less economical. Furthermore, the advent of inexpensive recordable CD and DVD drives for computers, followed by USB flash drives, pushed the Zip drive out of the mainstream market. Nevertheless, during their prime, Zip disks greatly eased the exchange of files that were too big to fit into a standard -inch floppy or an email attachment, and there was no high-speed connection to transfer the file to the recipient. The advantages of magnetic media over optical media and flash memory, in terms of long-term file storage stability and high erase/rewrite cycles, still affords them a niche in the data-storage arena. In September 1998, a
class action suit was filed against Iomega over a type of Zip drive failure dubbed the "
Click of Death", accusing Iomega of violation of the Delaware Consumer Fraud Act. In 2006,
PC World rated the Zip drive as the 15th worst technology product of all time. Nonetheless, in 2007,
PC World rated the Zip drive as the 23rd
best technology product of all time despite its known problems. ==Legacy==