IOmega

[Chuck Guzis]

On 27 Feb 2008 at 22:30, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote:

> What are folks experience with JAZ drives here.  I got one for non important
> 'small' stuff for use in my home fileserver....  got some used carts 
> with it, only tried 2 so far... one good, the other cart I think is bad.

Back when the Jaz was new stuff, we were involved with making 
recommendations for several hundred customers for the best removable 
mass storage medium for quick portable backups.  Many of our 
customers used tape (8mm/DLT mostly; 4mm DAT and Travan was just too 
unreliable), but some wanted faster random-access storage.

Many of our customers had used 150MB and 230MB Bernoulli drives with 
much success, so when the Jaz drive came out, they expected the same 
quality, particularly given the high media price.  Sadly, most were 
disappointed--many drives seemed to fail within a few months.  This 
may have been an issue of QC at the manufacturing site, but it was 
enough to make most of our customers swear off them.

The other thing that surprised many was that Iomega spec-ed the shelf 
life of the media at 10 years.  This is not good news.

To be fair, similar experiences were had with the Castlewood Orb 
drives and the Syquest SyJet.  Both of those companies are defunct, 
but Iomega plugs on.  I believe their current offering is the 35/70GB 
Rev drive.  I have no experiece with these models.

As usual, YMMV.  

Cheers,
Chuck