Two Notes of Warning
Written: Sep 13 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Convenient for Video
Cons: Design Inherently Flawed
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| gsearle's Full Review: Iomega Jaz 2GB (31181) External JAZ Drive |
The reviews already written for this device are great and hit the nail on the head. I just want to add two more pieces of data. I bought this drive for use with digital video. It seemed ideal at the time. It was fast (for a cartridge drive), convenient, and 2 GB can hold a lot of video for my purposes. I also have the Iomega Buz video hardware, which has an Ultra-SCSI port, which seemed to match up perfectly with this drive's Ultra-SCSI port.
First
The Jaz media is preformatted with servo tracks. The drive uses these tracks to position the head over the media. These tracks can become corrupted! The drive's firmware can compensate for a little corruption, but once the servo tracks degrade past a certain point, the media becomes completely unusable. The kicker -- the drive cannot restore these servo tracks. Iomega uses special machines at the factory to write these tracks -- the drive just does not have the capability.
Most people don't have any trouble with this, but some people do. I was one of those unfortunate people. The cartridges worked fine for a while, then their performance started to degrade. I eventually started getting errors, then unusable cartridges. Since the drive can't restore the servo tracks, the only recourse was to send the cartridge back to Iomega for a replacement. Of course, all of the data that was on the cartridge is gone forever.
After about five cartridges, I finally got fed up and got a full refund from Iomega, after sending them a lengthy document full of technical details on why I was so dissatisfied. Here's the gist: cartridges are formatted in a way that the consumer cannot fix them if certain error conditions occur. These error conditions shouldn't occur in the first place! It's simply a case of bad design.
The software hides this corruption under a number that is only visible from the utility that comes with the drive, as if it was s dirty little secret. It is a percentage that tells you the "health" of a cartridge. The manual recommends performing a full reformat of a cartridge when this number falls below a certain level. Unfortunately, during this formatting process the driver can suddenly decide that the cartridge is too corrupt, and refuse to format the media, after spending a few hours trying. At this point, the media is essentially destroyed and is completely unusable. It's a game of "Russian Roulette", and even Iomega recommends that you don't perform a full format.
First of all, why did Iomega design a media that must be reformatted every once in a while to maintain it? The user must back up the cartridge, reformat it, then restore it - and then there is a possibility of losing the media. This is unreasonable. Second, the attempts to make the software "user-friendly" to hide the corruption of the servo tracks only serves to confuse and irritate. Iomega has made the problem worse by denying that there is a problem in the first place. They'll just tell you to return a bad cartridge for a replacement, but will not give you any more details on the reasons behind the problem.
Second
Don't plug a Jaz drive into the Buz! The Buz has some firmware problems that make the Jaz's problems worse. It will generate errors and accelerate the corruption of the media. In fact, I don't recommend using the Buz's Ultra-SCSI port at all. If this was my only problem with this setup, I still would have returned the Jaz -- the drive's design is inherently flawed.
This wasn't exactly a glowing review, but then again I really don't like this product based upon my own experience, the technical facts behind its design, and Iomega's attempts to hide the problems.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
gsearle
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Member: Greg Searle
Location: Nashua, NH
Reviews written: 27
Trusted by: 10 members
About Me:
Computer graphics designer and software developer with interests in technology, home improvement, and family life.
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