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By Scott Wolf
In 1995, Iomega’s little blue zip drive made PC World’s The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years. These popular drives gave many users their first taste of easy to use backup and storage media. We thought it would be fun to crack one open and see how it was put together.
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Most of us will remember these zip drives. Iomega started shipping these little wonders in 1995, when a 1 gigabyte hard drive was $625.00.
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About the size of a paperback book, with little rubber feet to allow for horizontal or vertical placement.
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The underside of the case, nothing too fancy.
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Clever little diagram, in case you somehow can’t figure out how to attach a parallel printer cable (there’s only one way to attach it though).
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I removed the rubber feet (where you typically find screws these days) but there were none. From this picture you can see that the case has tabs that hold it together.
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This crack open required some very technical tool. I started with a 25-cent steak knife from Big Lots. Lightly pressing down on the slots while pulling apart made for easy access.
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Other side.
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More tabs to press on.
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The last tab to get loose…
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Upper case easily removed to reveal the innards.
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Here you can clearly see the arm that tells the drive a disc has been inserted. Unfortunately this model was not operational so I could not get a shot of it in action.
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The only thing holding the drive motor mechanism secure were two rails, one along each side. You can see those rails in the image, they appear as black rails on each side of the drive.
Once you got the mechansim off those rails, it pivots easily, still held by two springs in the front, and two cables attached the mainboard. One was a white cable seen in the top left hand corner, the other a tiny ribbon cable seen in the bottom left corner.
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Springs about to be removed. Use eye protection.
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After the springs were removed and the two cables unplugged, the motor mechanism easily lifted out.
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The front bezel was held on by two pieces of plastic that had holes in them. The pegs for these holes were attached to the bottom case.
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The side rail guides for the drive motor mechanism were held in place by two pegs each, that sat in two holes on each side of the bottom case. They easily lifted out.
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With no cables attached, the mainboard was literally just laying loosely on the bottom case. I lifted the mainboard out to reveal a heat shield on the bottom of the case.
This lifted out easily which caused the rear bezel to lift out as well. Resulting in the picture shown above.
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Top of the mainboard shown here. As you can see, the rear parallel ports provide for a parallel port passthrough, to enable having a printer AND this device hooked up at the same time.
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Underside of the mainboard.
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Here I took a picture of the top label on the mainboard, for anyone interested.
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Markings on the chip indicate this is a
IOMEGA
Phaethon
02590303
DP13836
R9724
Internet results didn’t turn up much about this.
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Again, took a picture of the underside label, in case you care.
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The only thing left to take apart at this point was this clear protective housing attached to the drive motor assembly.
This took the smallest allen head I have ever seen, a .5. The bigger question is, why did I have this tool in my house, I don’t know.
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With the clear protective housing removed, you can clearly see the drive arm that is used to read the sectors on the disc. See next image for a closeup.
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Here is a closeup of the drive arm. Unfortunately, due to the non-working state of this drive, I wasn’t able to get any action shots of this arm in motion.
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Here’s a look at the drive motor completely torn apart.
