Yes! I bought one of these back in 1997. It worked great for about five months and then died. I called their online tech support and a wonderful woman agreed to ship me a replacement at no cost the same day and didn't even need me to send back the defective unit. I thought that was excellent customer service...until I read that the company shut down about a week later. No wonder she was kind enough to send me a new unit without worrying about the return, she knew her days were numbered (the second unit also died within six months).

@RadioactiveBlueberry

5 ай бұрын

Her boss found a way to close the business with clean inventory and less angry customers

@SL4RK

5 ай бұрын

Nevertheless, this is an unattainable level of service in this day and age....

@imgladnotu9527

5 ай бұрын

​@@SL4RKespecially for a company doomed to fail anyways

@blehhhh

5 ай бұрын

Give it away, give it away, give it away, give it away now

@nkt1

5 ай бұрын

@@SL4RKIs it? My father’s CO2 alarm’s sealed battery died years too soon. The manufacturer shipped him a replacement unit free of charge, no questions asked.

Considering how drives of this era randomly failed, I can see how a no-name format could deter people from buying. Zip drives may have been slow, but it’s fairly easy to replace a bad drive.

@billant2

5 ай бұрын

I had a Jaz drive back in the late 90's. While it worked fine and was a great value with its 1 and 2 GB cartridges, pretty much all ended up dying with the click of death and loss of data.. Zip drives were more reliable but only a quarter of the Jaz's storage capacity. For graphics and video editing I needed large storage. Eventually hard drives became more affordable and reliable.

@tyta1

5 ай бұрын

Unfortunately, replacing a bad drive didn't always resolve the actual issue - many times at least one of the disks was faulty and would destroy the new drive once it was inserted...

@presteign1113

5 ай бұрын

While this probably wouldn’t have saved the company, I immediately thought of something they could have done to fix the “it breaks if you carry the drive while there’s a disc in it” problem. The power-down sequence for the drives should have automatically ejected the discs! It might have been slightly more annoying having to reinsert a disc later if you turn off your computer, but this would have probably saved Avatar's reliability reputation.

@tshackelton

5 ай бұрын

Floppys didn't set the reliability bar too high.... Zips/Jaz/Syquest were failure prone too but when you can hold 100x storage and fail 30% as much, it looks great in relative terms. If this thing was less reliable that DSHD floppies, I really feel bad for their customers. LS120 had the best shot of any 3.5" replacement, it's killer feature was ~4x speedup on std 1.44 disks.

@TheElusiveReality

5 ай бұрын

​@@presteign1113this is such a simple but smart solution, I'm surprised no one in the company thought of it (or if they did it was way too late)

I did tech support for this product! The biggest problem was the AT keyboard power adapter. While the majority of AT motherboards were tolerant of removing and replacing the keyboard without powering off the machine, some were not, and most importantly, the spec did not require them to be, and so, despite having copious warnings about shutting down the machine before removing the AT keyboard and installing the adapter, it was still a common enough call that we got in support that someone fried their motherboard because they unplugged the keyboard while it was on.

@reabstraction

3 ай бұрын

That sounds horrifying!

Love hearing about these "super floppies", the transition between floppies and CD/flash memory. All these obscure formats.

@Aeduo

5 ай бұрын

They were all pretty pricey too and never really came down much as far as someone who isn't a professional or just young being able to pick one up. They would've been great though for copying games from friends' computers though in the later 90s when you had multi-disk games or games on CD that were in the 10s of MBs. Wouldn't've helped a bit later when games were basically using the entire capacity of CDs and started having CD checks.

@speedyboishan87

5 ай бұрын

Didn't take off since you had CD Writers, both internal and USB in order to backup, photo's, music etc. It was when DVD writers came in 2003 from then you could make DVD's or backup data. Now you have a 100GB BDXL Blu-Ray disc though it's more efficient to store data on a USB Flash drive i have an Integral from 2008 and still working to this day.

@belstar1128

5 ай бұрын

it made sense since regular floppies remained stuck at 1.44 mb since the late 80s. i wonder what happened they progressed quickly in the 70s and 80s. but then stopped improving despite the era of cd r still being far away .

@Aeduo

5 ай бұрын

@@belstar1128 it seemed like normal floppies were considered good enough for consumers and office workers and they only marketed the larger capacities to bigger business use and seemingly some education contracts here and there. Much wider margins and much less pressure to mass produce if you only target high end customers and contracts. Kinda the way Nvidia does nowadays.

@belstar1128

5 ай бұрын

@@Aeduo not in the later 90s when people started using things like photoshop and the internet and needed decent storage .i guess in 1990 most people just had short text documents. but it all changed quickly

While Zip drives werent ubiquitous, they were the closest thing to it. The drives and disks were relatively cheap, that even a teenager at the time like me, could afford them. Plus they were portable, if not conveniently so. In order to beat out the Zip drive, you really had to make something that was significantly better in multiple ways, which no manufacturer accomplished until CD writers became mainstream.

@EdKolis

5 ай бұрын

I still used zip drives after I had a CD writer. CDs are really finicky, you can't just save a file to them. You have to stage and commit it, or something like that - a two step process. And if you do the commit step wrong, you could wind up making the CD permanently read only! But once USB flash drives came out, then I stopped using zip drives. They combined the capacity of a CD with the convenience of a zip drive.

I remember a big part of not pushing for anything like a zip drive on our computers for my friend group back then was; we all had cd-roms on our computers already, and we knew that cd burners existed. We were all just waiting for the burners to come down in price. It was typical to see zip-style drives being able to store 100-300 megabytes back then, but CDs could store upwards of 650MB, IIRC.

@brentsummers7377

5 ай бұрын

Yep, the first CD burner I saw on sale was about $1500 US. Crazy expensive.

@peoplez129

4 ай бұрын

Zip drives were pretty cheap, and that's why they were so popular. And the contrast between the pitiful 1.44MB floppy drives, which you needed a lot of to equal the same storage, made sense. Especially since most people had to use more than 1 floppy for files bigger than 1.44MB, which meant you needed to swap out discs just to read one file or have a lot of half empty discs from files that didn't take up the whole amount. So when people saw zip drives, they basically saw 200 floppy discs in a single cartridge, which is what really attracted people at the time. It simplified things.

I worked in the ISP/Telco space during this period. The storage wars were madness. A true blast from the past. Thanks for the PTSD ;)

That disk format was a day late and a dollar short with releasing years after the Zip, Jaz, and other disk drives. Also by 1997, they were starting to come out with flash memory cards that were far smaller and durable!

I like to think I kept very up to date with all hardware in 1997 but... this one escaped me, today is the first time I have ever seen it. I will say that iomega in particular had excellent marketing at this time, while they were a 'known' brand they were still making a new foray into the consumer market where the brand wasn't so well known but their advertisements, articles and even packaging were all very well thought out. They seemed to very easily slot into the role the market had opened up, I admit those blue drives just had something cool about them despite me really having no real use for such a limited format. The only true competitor I remember was the more open LS-120 format which did appear in a lot of pre-builts and had a lot of advantages.

Glad I didn't invest into this platform in the 90's and instead chose to wait it out for 512GB SD cards to hit the market 25 years later.

Where I live there were basically no other options for external storage for the common user except floppies, we only got writable CD-ROMS and USB flash storage by the end of the nineties. We heard about zip and jaz drives but nobody I knew had one. So, I'm thankful that you (and others) tell these stories about failed but interesting stuff from those times!

@CapTVchilenaShootingStarMax

5 ай бұрын

Same in my country. It seems there were plenty of disk formats being developed in USA and everywhere, but since none became a “standard”, these barely reached my country, and everyone was using floppies, then CD burners, and then USB flash drives.

@kaio0777

5 ай бұрын

yeah here in the caribbean we didn't know much about the other media until it was too late my brother had ZIP drives tho only one in my country i think at the time before CD caught on so i love these episodes they teach a lot.

@krazownik3139

5 ай бұрын

Exactly the same in Central/Eastern Europe. Here we have made a direct transition from floppies to CDs in the late 90'. Sometimes someone somewhere had a Zip drive, but probably got it from uncle in USA. Even cassette tapes were more popular than Zip drives due to their usage in professional environments like early data-centers. And CDs never truly went away, there are still used as an official data format by various government offices. Even a few days ago I hear in the news that someone destroyed a DVD disk with evidence regarding Pegasus spyware scandal in the prosecutor office.

@samholdsworth420

5 ай бұрын

I had a zip drive on my Macintosh performa 405. I don't think we ever used it 😂

@fallingwater

5 ай бұрын

Same here. It was like tech was a level below other places; corporate customers got zips and normal mortals got floppies. Nobody I knew personally had a zip and I only ever saw one jaz, in the hands of a big-time server operator.

I love videos like this that cover failed technology! In 1997, I was an avid reader of _Byte_ and I was doing a PC repair certificate at the local Community College, yet I was utterly unaware of this product.

6:29 I have two Castlewood Orb drives (an internal and an external) and a bunch of discs. 2.2GB of storage per disc made them a great choice at the time

Do you remember the Iomega click! drives? They were very similar the Avatar Shark drives. Clik! Disks held 40mb, but there may have been other capacities I never saw. I still have a few of the disks laying around, but no drive.

@ThePhoenixcompanies

5 ай бұрын

I still have a laptop card based click drive. It is in a case that holds two disks. After all the click of death problems they had with zip disks, I could never figure out why they named it the click drive, though.

6:32 - Oh wow. I had totally forgotten about the Orb drive - that b-roll brought back some memories of owning one!

Portable storage for the general PC and Mac using public back in the 1990s was like the Wild West. I was familiar with floppies, Zip and Jaz drives but I didn't own the latter two because they cost too much and I didn't really need "that" much storage. I was so glad to see CDs and smaller storage cards become the norm not long later. Never heard of this company nor its product though. Thanks for the intro, I love this channel!

Learning about older technology, especially this more obscure stuff, is always cool, great video! 🙏

All these formats battled it out in the ads and articles in those thick 1990's computer magazines. All are long gone, including the magazines.

I evaluated this drive tech in the later 1990s for HP (former Colorado Memory Systems division). It was very fragile, and the self destruct “feature” was discovered in the first 2 days of testing. HP was having the typical large company conflicts with fears of entering a consumer market would damage their high margin WORM drive business. In the end, HP went with the CD-R technology and sourced a drive from Philips. Have you heard of the COMBYTE dual drive (floppy & backup tape drive, Fort Collins, CO) or OnStream (backup drive based on the Philips DCC Tech, Louisville/Lafayette! CO)? Both were storage companies started by former Colorado Memory employees.

@MatthewMakesAU

5 ай бұрын

I had an HP CD burner! One of the original ones that came with a scsi card

@EarthSurfer

5 ай бұрын

@@MatthewMakesAUThat drive kit (CD-R drive with SCSI card, usually sold as an external unit) would have been developed and tested by the Colorado Memory Division in Loveland, Colorado. I still have readable CD-Rs from one of those drives! The CD-R tech promoted by Philips (typically "gold disk") was rated at a 50 yr life but was limited to a 4x write speed. SONY went for the high speed write with only a ~5 year life. Obviously SONY's strategy won, and Philips quickly caught up.

@MatthewMakesAU

5 ай бұрын

@@EarthSurfer I remember the gold discs well, I still have a couple somewhere. They were expensive, but very pretty

@Liam3072

4 ай бұрын

I mean, aren't all drives from that era super fragile? I remember Syquest's SparQ infamous click of death, and I believe Iomega had similar issues...

@EarthSurfer

4 ай бұрын

@@Liam3072Wasn't that any storage in general in that era? It was the major reason for all the backup tape products in the 1990s. If you didn't receive a brick from Miniscribe, your $500 40MB HDD would eventually become a useless block of metal within 3 years. I still remember all the HDDs shipped in Dell systems that seemed to have a life of about 18 months. I worked on backup tape development for 15 years, so my memory of failing may be skewed.

I remember this period well when there were so many disk formats available and I had trouble figuring out how to deal with longevity for format. So glad this is no longer an issue for consumers.

You should try to find any of the people involved and ask them for an interview. The info should be available in public company registries.

This is some GREAT technology for it's time!

they had one of these in the multi-media classroom my sophomore year of high school back in 2001. the teacher liked to collect old and discontinued peripherals and storage mediums like this. he was one of my favorite teacher and taught me everything from 3d animation using Strata 3d and Maya to video and photo editing and even screen printing. I took his classes every year

I remember opting for a tape drive. The format was slow, but established. Tape drives still hold up for pure data backups.

I had a couple of ZIP drives back in the day. Since the disks were mainly used for school work, it made sense to use the same disk format that the Macs in the school's computer lab used. I think that was a big leg-up to ZIP: OEM integration, and from Apple of all companies too.

Thats a nice story with some great research. I would share some of my experience. I have 2 drives and several disks, and they were awesome. They really were portable hard drives of the time. Not only could I share files between my desktops and laptops, I could run program executables directly on them. Also video files could be played directly from the disks, so in general I accessed all files directly without needing to copy them to the internal storage. You cant really do that with Zip or other floppy formats as the load times would be impractical. Jazz and other removable hard drive formats were more expensive, bulky, and usually not compatible with parallel ports and DOS. I left my parallel cable connected to my main desktop and swapped the drive to the pccard cable for laptop, until i got the second drive so i just swapped discs. This lasted me a while until the storage size was not enough, by which time usb thumb drives already became mainsteam. Oh and the disks came in protective rubber cases. I always stored my disks in them as soon as they were out of the drive.

I lived through the 90's and do not recall this format either. Must have been very obscure.

I remember using Zip on early digital video editing stations in the late 90's

These would be perfect if they used modern hard drive platter densities! We need this as a passive data storage medium. Theres no good way to transfer larger untrusted files to an offline sandbox that doesn't make the transferring medium untrusted afterwards since you can't be sure they were erased, other than tapes or floppies. I'd buy it. Someone open source the drives and we'll shove modern platters in it.

Great video Colin. Happy holidays!

Still using CD's DVD's and Floppy disc's in 2023! But I also Stream, and have Sirius XM Radio. Being a boomer, I take advantage of all technologies.

I live in Silicon Valley (and have lived here for around 10 years now) so I love learning about these lesser-known Silicon Valley companies. Thanks for the great video!

I have never heard of it. I was into SyQuest EZ 135 drives as my choice vs Zip. Eventually I switched to Zip 250 because the later SyQuest drives (EZ 235, SyJet, SparQ) had hardware issues and a high failure rate. Those drives were not as solid as earlier models.

@midimoog

5 ай бұрын

Interestingly there were reliability issues with Iomega, too. The earlier Bernoulli drives were quite reliable but Zip and Jaz, especially the ones with larger capacity, often failed.

@aaronbredon2948

5 ай бұрын

​​​​​@@midimoogright. I used Bernoulli drives since the late 1980s. 8 inch 10MB, 5 inch 20 and 150MB drives. I had Zip and Jaz as well, but they had weaknesses compared to the uncrashable Bernoulli cartridges. Syquest had always had breakage and dust issues I remember the Shark and a few other drives (superfloppy, some WORM drives). The end came when CD-R and DVD-R drives became near ubiquitous. A 600 GB or 4.5GB disc that could be read in the CD and DVD drives in everyone's computer meant that specialized disks no longer had a market. Then USB flash storage eliminated almost everything.

Love your videos :D I really love retro Tech and PCs

Zip was of course notorious for the click of death. Its interesting though how long the floppy lasted and how shortly all its attempted replacements lasted with in the magnetic storage medium. the late 90s and early 2000s just brought such rapid progress. Its remarkable how fast we went from mechanical media to flash memory around that time period.

imagine you and techmoan make a "museum of forgotten media" while I know a repository already exists

I just discovered the Avatar Shark recently and ordered a NOS drive from Amazon (Parallel). I would really like to fabled SCSI version. During college I had first a Zip drive, the Jazz drive which were godsends. I never heard of Avatar until now. Thanks for the video. I have added it to my collection. Now if I could just find a Sony/Fujitsu HiFD drive! Keep up the good work.

I love this channel! Have a good weekend!

Great video! As you say the zip drive with its 100mb disks was just the right size for most home users. Around the mid 90's a lot of computers came with 420mb hard drives so zip drives were perfect.

I remember seeing this in our family business’ office. I was a kid back then. I did not see these last long and only saw this used like once or twice.

A well presented video, i found it really interesting

I had one of these on my Compaq Contura 430. It was very quick with the PCMCIA card and I ended up buying lots of disks and drives from ebay years ago. I lost my Avatar shark stuff in a move, but it was a fantastic piece of kit, the only better piece of equipment I had was my Bantam Backpack with the sound card!

it's a shame too, cuz damn those are cool names! how the hell did they blow the marketing that badly when they knew enough to use names like avatar and shark!

Very nice and informative video.

When I was at high school (1994) we started using Zip Disks in replacement to 1.44’s. They were fantastic, I don’t think I ever had one fail on me and they were chucked around in backpacks and pockets etc… the Zip disk itself is the reason I then chose to use MiniDisc for my music. CD’s whilst very prevalent, always seemed inconvenient!!

Neat drive. I had a zip and an LS120 back in that era. I preferred the LS due to its backwards compatibility.

I had the Zip drive as a teacher, I had a desktop on my teacher's desk and a desktop at home, which was where my Zip drive came into use. I had a Syquest HD, but never heard anything about Avatar's products. Now I see why. I think it came at the wrong time and their focus on trying to be a part of a desktop, and not developing the Laptop version sooner and lack of good advertising killed it. If it had been say 4-5 years later!

3:56: At first, right when you opened the disk's head slot, it looked floppy to me, but with a space only for swinging heads like modern hard disk drives use, which is what the Iomega Clik!/PocketZip disk and drive are (making Clik!/PZ the only floppy drive I had ever heard of to use swingers, which I only found out about maybe about a month ago of this video), but then when you put it in the drive it looked to have that more mirror-like finish like modern hard disks.

I am surprised ive never heard of or seen one of these things. Thx for the education. Cheers.

I had one of these. The Iomega "click of death" was a big motivator.

I was using zip drives at the time and a friend of mine got one of these and I loved it. I was just getting into doing portable stuff and dragging a laptop around and I just thought it was super awesome . You did show them or drive and that's what I got into after the Zip drive

Despite the abundance of options, non of them became extremely popular or a de-facto global "standard". Eventually CD-Rs swept the floor with competition. But during most of the 1990s, the average consumer didn't really have multimedia content of their own to store on removable medias. 1.44 MB floppy disks were sufficient for most people...

I'm proud to be from Milpitas. The tiny city among Silicon Valley giants, that has fostered more tech start-ups than you would ever guess, and has held the suppliers for many of the largest corporations. 😅 Awesome to see one tech tidbit from here.

5:17 I Like the "Cover Your Assets" Ad from Shark! If I saw that ad My Current age (21) in '97), I would buy their format!

I remember seeing adverts for this drive. But I often confused it with Iomega Click. So many formats before USB thumb drives finally managed to replace floppy disks.

The fierce competition in the 90s for a successor to floppy discs was crazy, Lol.

I bought one in 97 as well, a long with a IBM Aptiva. I was astonished it could hold a a whopping 250mb per disc. It worked well and never really had a problem with it. I also had the Sony floppy disc digital camera.

Damn this one escaped me, will have to keep my eyes open so i can grab one for my collection! Great video :D

@The_DreadStorm

4 ай бұрын

You too? I do the same thing. I have one of these too.

I was a computer nerd in the 90s. I used to read all the computer magazines. Went to grey market computer stores in the Bay Area to get white box (oem) components. That was how I got an Iomega Zip for my PC for only $99. Never heard of this. When I went to college for computer stuff at SFSU they were standardized on the Syquest 270. Which was expensive for the time. I never got around to getting my own Syquest drive! I just went to the open computer lab and hoped the machine with both formats wasn't in use. All our professors at the time were telling us WORM or something similar would be the next big thing. Nobody foresaw the USB thumb drive thing or SD cards.

Can't belive there were so many of these external data storage formats. All fighting for dominance at one stage. Yet now all obsolete in favour of high capacity USB sticks, SD/microSD memory cards and even portable hard drives.

I still have two of these drives with several discs. The last time I used them they worked fine. I should see if I can get them running again to see what I saved on the discs.

Yep-installed base. I worked in New York design in the 1990’s and we used syquest and jaz drives, but more importantly every type-house and printer we worked with also used both these formats. Your video is the first time I’ve heard of Avatar and, as you say I don’t see any compelling reason for anyone to switch.

I remember a drive that used 2.5 in hard drives but without the electronics. I do not know who made these, but at the time it seemed to be that it would not save enough cost to make it worthwhile. As a 2.5 in drive of any capacity could plug into a PATA port, but the number of heads, data rate, modulation, motor drive etc would be really specific to a single model year.

I love this period in computers. The mid 90s were a kind of wild west gold rush. Floppies had gotten too small and re-writable CDs and flash storage weren't a thing yet, so we have all these kinda odd formats in between. Most only lasted a few years, many were rather obscure. The Windows on an X86 CPU paradigm hadn't achieved complete dominance yet. Everything was still possible and it was easy to get your finger in the pie.

Hello! I had one of this Avatar Shark about early 2000´...In Argentina was a "Pre-pendrive" time, so those 250 mb represented a huge capacity!!

I had one of these! But still ended up using zip disks 95% of the time. The hardware itself feels pretty neat and interesting, but also felt more fragile than zip disks.

Even though I had forgotten the product, I sure remember that advertising campaign. I saw it when I was twelve (yes, I subscribed to PCMag), and it's fair to say that young me found the ad with the guy at 5:17 very interesting.

I had Zip, Jazz and Minidisk all before I was 13 Growing up with a CTO in the early 90s was rad

5:07: That article messed up: "The Zip drive will replace the floppy drive in forthcoming Micron Millenia PCs." * The Zip drive *IS* a floppy drive.

cool video please please make another video about your custom built retro PC!!!

Way back in the late 80s I worked at HDD manufacturer - they were for laptops and we tested them via the parallel port, which meant with a minimal amount of hardware you could easily cart around 10MB in your shirt pocket. When I brought up the potential of marketing the drives as portable high-capacity memory I was told by the engineers that it was "the dumbest idea they'd ever heard of."

People forget that CDs and floppies were still way more common around that time than even the most popular zip disks. Even if you were big during that time, it was short lived.

I bought one at the time, rarely used it, but it's still around somewhere in storage.

Worked at University...some faculty swore by these things, others swore at them. I worked support, and our 'solution' to the reliability issue was to buy 40 'spares', and swap them out as needed. That way I could fuss around with the NeXT computers and their magneto-optical storage system...when I wasn't fixing the tape-reader on the PDP-11....

Never heard of this before and I had a Zip drive in the day. The design language of the Avatar looks a lot like that of Iomega btw.

In high school my mate used to avoid handing in homework by pulling out a Zip disk and saying “here it is” - he knew our teachers did not have Zip drives. I thought that was very clever at the time

I remember EZ-Drive because we sued them for trademark infringement.

I loved my Shark drive! I think I still have it in a box somewhere.

I loved the Zip drives. I had a 100 and later 250 and used them a TON... For about 4-5 years. lol

Oh. I only knew of few transitional formats (well, by few, almost 10 probably) between floppies and cd and cd-r/rw, never had any, but saw them in few places (mostly magazines really), in middle to late 90s. But it looks like there were way way more formats than I could image, probably close to 60, by dozens of companies. Fascinating. Fierce competition, a lot of lost history and engineering efforts. Not always because the technically better product won, but due to many more factors.

I had the iomega portable. 100 meg doesn't sound like much, but my AT&T lappy only had an 80 meg HD.

Zip was so famous that I had an internal one in a drive bay at some point. They were ubiquitous until CD-R's. Not sure what Avatar, or any other company, was really thinking going up against Iomega in these days.

Having lived through that period, I remember the allure of high capacity removable media. However, all of them suffered from reliability problems - which made them less useful for anything other than short-term temporary storage. Personally I went with a QIC-80 tape drive for backups until recordable CD was available. Now-days external hard disks are cheap and can be accessed by any modern computer.

I saw one of those in my high school around 2000 in abandoned computer lab.

Even Jaz was mostly eclipsed by Zip drives. Once it became clear this would be a format war everyone just seemed to gravitate to the most common one. I recall people often complaining that we had chosen wrong and some other less favored format would have been better but most were aware that the future was going to be solid state and we were just waiting for that.

My high capacity removable storage of choice in the 90's was SCSI Magneto-Optical. I still have some drives and disks. I never got around to getting a MO drive and disks with LIMDOW. Light Intensity Modulation Direct OverWrite. Regular MO required 2 passes to over-write data. Pass 1 erased, pass 2 wrote. Only if a spot on the disk had never been written or had been erased previously could it just write. LIMDOW drives and disks could erase and write in one pass so were twice as fast at writing. LIMDOW drives could read and write regular MO disks, though had to do 2-pass writing. IIRC LIMDOW disks could be read in regular MO drives. Another storage tech I'd like to see TDNC do a video on is PD or Phase-change Dual and DVD-RAM. PD drives combined a 650 meg rewriteable disc (double that for dual sided), held in a cartridge, with a 4x CD-ROM drive. The tray was mounted on four weak springs so the PD cartridge would press it down. Eventually there would be PD/CD-R drives. I don't recall if there were ever any PD/CD-RW drives. The disc layout and writing method for PD was expanded to create DVD-RAM, which initially was available only in cartridges. DVD-RAM disks, when authored as DVD Video, could be broken out of their cartridges and played in many consumer DVD players and DVD-ROM drives. In short order, DVD-RAM cartridges were made designed to remove the disc, and eventually the cartridge was done away with. Drives that support DVD-RAM 1.0 can at least read PD discs. PD compatibility was dropped (according to the Wikipedia article) circa 1999 with DVD-RAM 2.0, which bumped per side capacity to 4.7 gig (matching single layer DVD-R) and 2x recording speed. DVD-RAM 2.0 is not to be confused with DVD-RAM2, which was mostly only used in Japan, and is not supported by many DVD players. More confusion is to be had with DVD-RAM 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 and *Revisions* 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0 which are 3x, 5x, 6x, 8x, and 12x speed, respectively. Revision 6.0 at 16x speed was proposed but never made.

my dad and I had one in the late 90s or thereabouts. I don't even remember exactly when we got ours or how much we used it, but I think I used the portable adapter on my laptop In the late 90s. of course I borrowed a dauphin in the 90s from a friend's mom too though, so there's that. Her Dauphin didn't have the shark disk though.

I bought one of these when they came out it was great.

I don't think I even heard of these things. I think my friends and I already all had zip drives by then.

Wow-I was in DTP in the 90's & I've NEVER heard of this!

As much as I have been keeping up with computers and evolutions ever since I was a kid, I've never heard of the Avatar Shark. Maybe because it was meant for the US market back then, not so much for Singapore. But even Zip Disks really weren't so much of a thing because to get Data to backup from another computer would require that to have another Zip drive. So I kinda staved off backups at all until CD-RWs started to take off then stuck to them before USB drives start to get more mainstream.

I still have some of my data from College on a couple of Zip disks. Haven't had a drive to look at any of it in years tho.

I loved any removable media drive for their mechanics - even though they tended to be rather unreliable and slow. Over the years I had a parallel port ZIP 100, internal ZIP 250 and internal Jaz drive. I was also tempted to get a SyQuest Sparq, but never did...

I like the company background info, but would like to have seen more hands on with the device itself. What does it sound like when running? What file system does it use? Fat32 or something proprietary? Out of 250mb how much is usable? Is there funky 90s file management software, icons, and graphics? What are real world read/write speeds? (ignoring the marketing numbers) This really feels like the first half of a video.

damn Avatar Systems was headquartered in my hometown

Sigh... I had one of these.... Around the same time I bought a 500MB Hard Drive and thought I'd never have to buy any more storage ever. Thanks for the nostalgia!

1:56 According to the chart, I had the slowest option with the Zip portable parallel.

I had the internal SyQuest EZ drive with 10 disks and loved it but eventually just got bigger harddisks.

aww, I had one of these, it was my first non-floppy removal storage medium. I always bet on the wrong horse.

1:02 -- I thought you were gonna say "Many options were from Istanbul" for a second XD