There was a time when 500MB was a high-capacity hard drive, and it was during this era that Iomega's Zip drive shone.

Released in 1994, the Zip drive quickly became the most popular of all the super-floppy products, offering 100MB of removable storage and later 250MB.

However, when CD burners made it easy to store 650MB on a cheap disc that worked in nearly any computer, Zip drives began to lose their lustre.

Iomega fought back with the Jaz drive, which supported 1GB and 2GB discs, but it couldn't compete on cost.

Unlike the floppy disk's graceful slide into obsolescence, however, Zip drives would depart in infamy.

Unbeknown to most, Zip discs were prone to developing misaligned heads, rendering the data on the disc unreadable.

A drive searching for missing data would produce an ominous clicking sound, which quickly became known as the Click of Death, as it was a sure sign that a catastrophic loss of data was on its way.

Although competing products such as SparQ and SyQuest continued to bump up the storage, the arrival of USB drives and the ability to have huge capacities rattling around in the pocket pretty much put paid to the days of proprietary storage.