Iomega Jaz Drive – How to Build a Better Doorstop
Written: Jan 30 '01 (Updated Feb 02 '01)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
|
Pros: None
Cons: Slower than Hard Drives, Not Dependable and expensive.
The Bottom Line: I can not think of a single good reason to purchase or recommend an Iomega Jaz drive. Buy a CD-R/RW or a tape backup instead.
|
|
|
| dlamarrx's Full Review: Iomega Jaz 2GB (31181) External JAZ Drive |
In my many years of using Iomega products, first as a computer professional, and more recently as a graphic artist, I have used, abused and discarded countless of their products. I remember as if it were yesterday the first day I used an Iomega drive…
It was the mid-eighties, and I was a young lad recently promoted from computer operator to programming assistant. That first day, I sat down in my new cubicle to draw up some data flow diagrams for the lead programmer. I was using an early Macintosh. Sitting next to that Mac was a box almost as large as the computer itself – an Iomega Bernoulli drive with two 8 inch 10MB cartridges. I thought I was in heaven with all that hard drive real estate! That drive was dependable, and developed in me my trust in Iomega products for years to come.
Jump ahead a dozen years with me, and I am now working for a TV commercial production company. I am tasked with building a new computer graphics system. After picking out a computer (an Amiga if you must know), I determined that I needed some form of external storage. The only cost effective storage at the time was the latest Iomega Bernoulli drive – which held a whopping 150 MB’s of data. I am still working for the same company, and we still use that drive. It’s been a dependable drive since the day we bought it.
Join me if you will in the here and now. Surrounding me even as I type are twelve Iomega products – seven Iomega Zip drives (both 100MB and 250MB) and five Iomega Jaz drives (both 1GB and 2GB varieties). Three of the five Iomega Jaz drives lie discarded in the corner – useless testaments to wasted money and painfully lost data. Occasionally, I’ll pull one out and prop the door open with it, just so that I can justify their extreme cost – talk about getting burned by the bleeding edge!
Our troubles started with our very first Iomega Jaz drive – an internal 1GB drive installed in a Dell Optiplex Gxpro. It seemed to work fine for many months. We used it to backup our scene files for 3D and 2D animation projects – critical data that we return to and reuse time and again. One day, a cartridge wouldn’t eject, so I rebooted the computer and again it wouldn’t eject. I selected the manual eject process (inserting a straightened paperclip does the trick) only to hear a dreadful grinding sound – scratch one $85 disk! A few weeks later I put an older cartridge in to restore a project, but the drive didn’t recognize the media. Starting to feel worried, I switched to our new and second Iomega Jaz drive – installed on a Macintosh 8100 as an external drive, and had no problems accessing the data. Unfortunately, all of the file names had been concatenated into the MS-DOS 8.3 format – effectively giving me hours of agony as I slowly had to re-rename each and every file to it’s original long file name. I never was able to get that cartridge to work in that internal drive again. As fate would have it, that internal drive would become the first of our new doorstops – as it stopped functioning completely a few weeks later.
I replaced that drive with a 2GB external drive (which did read that original “corrupt” Jaz disk) and all was happy in graphics land again – for awhile at least. Eventually, it too went the way of the first – taking another cartridge with it – this one full of data, data never to be recovered again.
I finally realized that I had a problem on my hands – I had over twenty cartridges of data, data I was terrified of loosing. Gritting my teeth, I purchased one more Iomega 2GB Jaz drive, and at the same time, I bought an HP CD-R/RW drive. The FIRST thing I did was to back up ALL of my data from Jaz to CD-ROM, one disk at time.
It has been almost two years since I’ve had to use my Iomega 2GB Jaz drive. I often receive client files and information on floppy, Zip and CD-ROM, but never have I needed that Jaz drive. My CD-ROM burner has faithfully archived my client data with nary a hiccup. Eventually, our second Iomega 1GB Jaz drive gave up the ghost and we chose to replace it with a CD-R/RW too.
As it stands, I can not think of a single good reason to purchase or recommend an Iomega Jaz drive. In my experience, they are not dependable, they are more expensive per megabyte than the alternatives, they are slower than most hard drives, and they are not prevalent enough in the industry to need for compatibility reasons. Buy a CD-R/RW or a tape backup instead.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 350
Operating System: Windows and Macintosh
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
dlamarrx
|
|
Location: Seattle, WA
Reviews written: 32
Trusted by: 65 members
About Me:
Video Production Manager for an Advertising firm, my favorite time is spent with my family.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.