If you didn’t outfit your PC with a Zip drive when you bought it, now’s your chance.  Iomega’s ubiquitous removable-storage device, which is suitable for everything from shuffling large files between PCs to backing up important chunks of data, has completely broken the $100 barrier.

A kind of big brother to the floppy disk drive, the Zip stores 100MB of data on cartridges that cost as little as $9 a piece.  It’s much faster than a floppy drive, and a lot more portable.  The $99 external model plugs into any PC’s parallel port, so you can move it between different machines with little difficulty.  While 100 MB (and even 250 MB) seems small in the face of today’s gargantuan, multi-gigabyte hard drives, it’s still big enough to be practical.

Why get a Zip drive instead of a CD-RW drive?  First off, Zip drives cost less.  Also, Zip disks come preformatted (and are also quickly reformatted if needed).  In addition, some Zip drive models (SCSI, internal IDE) are as fast as hard drives!

The drive is a snap to install, thanks in part to an excellent instruction manual.  Iomega also bundles friendly software for making backups, copying disks, and recording multimedia files.  The only bummer is that in some packages not even a single Zip cartridge is included.

Manufacturer: Iomega Corporation
Platform: DOS, Windows, Macintosh
MSRP: From $99.95 (internal ZIP 100 IDE/ATAPI, ZIP 100 parallel port) to $179.95 (Zip 250 USB)
Street Price: $59.95 (internal ZIP 100 IDE/ATAPI) or higher (depends on model)