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Iomega Settles Zip Drive Suit (With Rebates)
JPM, III writes: "Excite news reports that Iomega Corp. will give rebates to millions of customers as part of a settlement of a class-action lawsuit that claimed its Zip drives are defective. U.S. customers who bought a Zip drive from a store or authorized manufacturer between January 1, 1995, and March 19, 2001, will be entitled to rebates worth up to $40 for various Iomega products. The settlement comes out of a lawsuit filed in Delaware in 1998 that claimed that Zip drives had a manufacturing flaw that often caused the drives and disks to fail. (Read an April 1998 Computer Link Magazine article about the 'Click of Death' deficiency.) My question: Where do I go to get my rebate?" Does being allowed to settle such a suit with rebates worth less than the cost of a zipdrive strike anyone as a little odd? (Maybe the cigarette companies should have tried this tactic.)
Guess you win the moron award. He never calls a "printer port". And it's true that it was invented for printers (don't call it a PARALLEL Port when it's proper name is a CENTRONICS-COMPATIBLE PARALLEL port. Can you guess what CENTRONICS made?)
Believe me... they did...
I am sure that the amount of money that has been spent in the US health system alone dealing with smoking related illnesses over the last 30 years would come out at more than the $200 billion they settled for.
Then take into account compensation that they should have to pay out to individual smokers that believed them when they said that smoking wasn't harmful..
The cigarette company executives, the marketting and public relations types and the scientists that aided the companies in the full knowledge that cigarette smoking was harmful should face trial for mass murder and crimes against humanity.
*grumble*
I guarantee you the lawyers didn't get paid in Iomega coupons.
You don't demand a thing from a corporation. You can only do requests.
Well, also figure the lawyers on this class action case are probably getting at least 50% of the settlement. They don't work for free. Bastards. I love class action suits. If you look around enough you'll find tons of get-rich-quick lawyers looking to make some money attached to them.
Yeah, that or a Western Digital. Anyone remember the Caviar series 2 drives? Those were the WORST. I remember shipping lots of them back.
Wonder why they stopped making SCSI drives? Oh yeah, because their drive reliability was so bad, no one would buy their SCSI drives unless they needed something dirt cheap (and I'll bet 9 times out of 10, they discovered why the drives were so cheap).
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Maybe because the suit was filed in a US court? If you want to collect damages in Canada, sue them in a Canadian court... Hey, maybe you'll get lucky and get more than a rebate. :)
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
More likely that's just an arbitrary cut-off date, so they don't have to give rebates to everyone who buys a zip drive in the future... Since they haven't admitted liability in the settlement, I wouldn't expect them to have actually changed anything in response to it.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
So if you're a member of the affected class, go object!
I'd consider it if the court weren't several thousand miles away from me... It certainly doesn't bug me enough to take the trip, just to sit on my ass and complain loudly. :)
Anybody going to be in Deleware in June? Feel free to visit the court (June 8, 10 am, Delaware Superior Court) and complain.
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
I think we all remember the lack of success getting money with their zip drive rebate...or have we forgotten.
Actually, I got my Zip drive rebate back in '96. Judging by the lawsuit over those I think I was the only one though...
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
Actually, a less drastic method I have used is to hold the drive in my hand, power on the computer, and then twist my wrist so that the drive is gently jerked in a circular fashion. This has worked on all of the 8GB Maxtors we had sticking and some of my friends various maxtor hard drives.
I think he was responding to the complaints about how slow a ppa zip was...
-30-
Great, another pathetic settlement out of iomega. Erilly similar to the one for Ditto tape drive fiasco; which was even worse if memory serves... just cash back on media. Now when are they going to fess up that the Jaz drives are even bigger piles of shit than the Zip and Ditto combined? In the time my warrenty (twice extended by Iomega) lasted Mine was replaced three times and "fixed" twice. All five times I paid shipping to them and was without my drive for a week to a month, and that was only after numerous long distance calls and a lot of bitching and complaining. Total data loss somewhere in the range of 12 Gig. Oh well... cheap CDRW pretty much spells the death knell for iomega, good ridence.
I don't know what physical malfunction caused the click of death, but my guess is that it was some instrument scraping against the media within the disk.
this page has a good description of what you're talking about.
I got an internal scsi drive back in '98, and I'd only had it for a bit over a year when I got the problem. I didn't bother getting a replacement, because I wasn't using it much, and I threw the drive out. I'm now wishing I hadn't, because at the university I'm at, the student computing machines all have zip drives. Being on dialup, copying big files onto zipdisk would be a lot easier than emailing them around =)
Why the hell are you posting the same thing to every zip owner's comment? Jesus fucking Christ.
I use still use Zip, but at a very low (but frequent) volume. I have a Zip that I carry in my shirt pocket back 'n' forth from work every day. I mainly just jot notes and reminders into it, much like other people would use a PDA. Occasionally move larger stuff, but only maybe a few times per year.
I use it instead of CDRW because it's physically smaller (remember: shirt pocket) and because "regular" removable media drives tend to get along better with OSes than CDRWs. The CDRWs that I have seen, required special applications to write to 'em. Whereas with SCSI Zips, you just plug 'em into the computer and they work w/out any extra software.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Ok, the 'settlement' is just goddamn stupid. I'd like to see Firestone try to get away with giving people a $20 coupon to settle the faulty 'AT' tires they produced.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Although your response is funny (and if i could, i would probably mod it up), but the consensus around here (my apartment, not /.) is that the better order is freeze, whack, crack. This is because freezing is most likely to work without damaged sectors
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
or freeze it for a couple of hours .... this sometimes works...
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
http://www.iomega.com/rinaldi/request_rebate.html
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Er... they did; I've seen Zip disks manufactured by Fujifilm and Maxell. Same price as Iomega-branded disks though.
My guess is that their licensing fees were too high for other manufacturers to sell at competitive prices.
goatsex link.
--
--
RumorsDaily
I found the class action proposed settlement notice in my snail mail today.I honestly don't recall registering my Zip drive when I bought it in 1995 (I never register my hardware)
I'll assume that statement isn't a line of BS, but even so, what the fuck is $12.50 towards a Zip 100 Drive? Should I be satified with that? Are you?! $12.50 is a small fraction of what I paid... and what about the ruined zip cartridges?!
Besides, this settlement (to my knowledge) only addresses US citizens, which I am not.
BTW, a friend tried to have his defective Iomega zip drive replaced and Iomega refused. The retailer from where he bought the zip drive decided to make an exception and replace it out of their own stock (which they didn't have to do). I personally don't need the hassle, but I hope others reading this will consider my experience with Iomega's zip drive before buying.
Iomega drives aren't terrible, but I don't believe they have any regard for their customers (hense the lawsuit).
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
This pittance of a settlement (re:$12.50 against a new Iomega zip drive) isn't a punishment, it's free advertising! It may lull people into thinking Iomega is looking out for their customers when they were in reality forced to in a lawsuit settlement.
All I can say (as an owner of a defective zip 100 drive) is to not purchase an Iomega product if you don't need the hassle of returning bad hardware and waiting weeks/months for a replacement or coupon.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
My first Iomega zip 100 worked fine for several years until it started mysteriously clicking (aka: click of death) whenever I tried to read the contents of a zip cartridge. In fact, I soon learned every cartridge I inserted into the defective zip drive was also rendered unusable! Instead of trying to get my severely-out-of-warranty zip drive replaced, I opted to avoid the headache and bought a new one. I later found a site which describes step-by-step how to fix a clicking zip drive yourself.
IMO, Iomega have been pricks about fixing their overly delicate hardware, and this court ruling won't protect consumers or punish Iomega. How many people will even hear about this ruling?
.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
There's still a bit of a problem. Iomega seems to have disowned the ZipPlus. You can't find it anywhere on their website. I hate companies that disown products.
the notice that was mass-mailed out to seemingly everyone can be found at Iomega's site in PDF. I haven't checked word-for-word, but the PDF appears to have the same content as the mailing.
eh. do a little looking into and get free porn all the time on your TV. Amen.
I have a decent respect for TIP "Trouble in Paradise", an unfortunatly Sindows only utility.
.exe for 32bit Sindows}
It has brought back several otherwise unreadable zip discs that were out on my scsi chain drive.
I was willing to try this util, as I have been a great fan of his SpinRite util for years.
Just one man's Datapoint, Your Life may Vary...
Adam
Trouble in Paradise page {has link to free anti-COD utility}
Trouble in Paradise utility {yes, it's a
GRC's Home
So I spoke out of my ass again. For that, I apologize.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
It may be an industry standard, but it is still slow as shit for data transfers. If he bought a Geforece and hooked it upto a 13 inch vga monitor with a .35 dot pitch from 1995 that only does 640x480, then complained about the quality of the video, what would you have said
Are you still use electrons in your computer? but those have been used since ENIAC and they are obviously out dated. So upgrade those electrons to protons or neutrons.
Good timing. I received a letter from the law firm in the mail today. Several pages, mostly legalese, outlining everything.
Since I never had any problem with my Zip (until it eventually died after a couple years), I tossed the form.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I once had a teacher (oh, and I use that term loosely) at a large American university who seemed like an obsessive supporter of Iomega products in general, but specifically Zip disks. Oh, she was so hip and techno, gosh. What a self-congratulatory blather machine.
... pass the mustard?" because a) it just didn't concern them all that much, and probably justifiedly so, that the cretinous pedagog said one thing or the other about Zip drives b) most people just don't care much about computer hardware, and by that I mean most people in general, not most people reading Slashdot :)
I told a few of my classmates what a joke they were, pointed out the proprietary problems with them, how few companies ever built in Zip drives, the miniscule capacity, the high price of disks, etc. (I didn't even know about the CoD yet.) But most of them just said "eh, that's nice. Uhh
I hope that lousy, condescending, malodorous, ill-spoken sanctimonious sow had a lot of her savings in Iomega stock. Enjoy your five dollars, Fatty! (Not her real name.)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I don't think I've ever really had problems with mine. Every once in a while, I'd worry about it, but it usually came through in the end. Surprisingly, it seems I have some sort of appeal to hardware - my stuff usually works for me, even if it gives me problems in spells (lately my computer likes to crash itself, but we'll have a nice chat about it...). I got one of the letters today about the rebate, though, and I thought it was quite exciting. I probably won't send in to get it though, but I know I'll check my drive first, before I decide to just toss the opportunity.
Insert mind here.
From the article:
> Iomega will also donate $1 million in products
> and services to schools, pay attorneys fees for
> the lawsuit and provide free technical support
> for customers who experience the clicking.
So, the rebate thing may suck, but they are also putting in some community service, which i think is a good thing (tm)
Sounds like the 'SCSI' interface on my mustek scanner. It came with its own SCSI card and cable. When I plug it into my SCSI chain it causes my chain to die. I called them asking about termination issues with the scanner (since it doesn't have a termination switch) and they told me "you don't need to terminate the SCSI chain if you use our cable." I was like _WHAT?_ they said plug the card in and connect the scanner using the supplied cable. Turns out that really isn't the solution either because the scanner freaks out sometimes even with that solution. I managed to stabilize the mess with a dedicated ISA adaptec AHA1522 (from 1989 or something), and a nice pair of active terminators. Any other combination yields unstable performance. I thought the whole point of SCSI was so that I could connect multiple devices to the same chain.
Well its all find and dandy until someone ships broken devices. Lately I've been hearing similar issues with people who have USB hubs and a bunch of things chained together. The 'I plugged in the keyboard, game controller, mouse, scanner, DVC, and the machine boots really slowly and with the scanner plugged in the mouse jumps around' problems. Recently I heard of a USB CDRW that only worked on a dedicated USB card. I find the whole thing really sort of funny, except when i'm the one a friend calls up and asks to fix their computer.
Last thing, really, why don't people use ls-120's? the disks are cheaper, the drives are cheaper and I think they work fairly well? Any ideas?
Because they were slower, and more expensive than zip drives (at least in the mid-late 90's, when most of those things were bought). Its all relatively academic now, with cdrs being faster, cheaper, and bigger than both zips or ls-120s.
I'm curious, who's still using zip/ls-120, and why?
Cheers
First off, if your drive has it do not use it, and don't use any disks you used in it. Its a hardware problem, the OS makes no difference. The click is caused by the read/write heads scratching the surface of the disk. Once a drive has the problem, it will scratch any disk used in it. If you use a scratched disk in a working drive, it will cause the problem in the new drive.
Cheers
Exactly. I received a notice in the mail, looked at the terms and tossed it. Who in their right mind is going to buy more Zip stuff at this point? If they had had more decently-priced cartridges and had handled the CoD properly in the first place, I might still be using Zips every now and then... but sheesh, why bother these days?
Personally, as the owner of 4 zip disks that 'click', I would have preferred a method whereby you could return the disks for an exchange, and they would rescue data on said disks.
To me that's the real problem...I have about a dozen other disks with no problems, but these 4 have some data going back a 5 years or so, that I would *love* to see again.
A rebate toward a new drive is utterly useless and contemptous. They could even recycle the old disks if they offered an exchange!
You don't need your receipt, or box, or UPC. The date(Year?) of purchase and drive's serial number is sufficient.
Fill out this form online.
Note that, in order to get the rebate, your drive has to actually have done the Click-of-death as they describe it. Also note that they're not handing out rebates /yet/ - You're just putting your name in the queue to get one - You have to return at/around October 31st to actually get it.
Make sure you keep notes on your filing - Fulfillment companies are famous for 'accidentally' dropping stacks of requests into the trash.
I bought my zip drive within a few weeks of its initial release, and I have YET to have a problem. Compared to today's standards: A bit slow? Yeah. Defective? Hardly.
Want to talk defective? I've got a stack of Maxtor hard drives...
hehe. had to reply...
I've built, maintained and fixed/upgraded hundreds (thousands?) of systems. When the HD fails miserably (it's always miserable, isn't it?), 9 times out of 10 it's a Maxtor drive. WTF is up with that? I can't think of another manufacturer of hardware that I am more wary of.
Where's my $40 token gesture, you bastards?
No sig.
Computer Link magazine writes:
Iomega writes:
OK, so now does anybody in the NJ area have a Zip disk that suffers from the "Click of Death"? I'll pay hard $$$ for it.Daniel J. Peng
I received a settlement notice in the mail; I assume this is because I registered my warranty information with Iomega.
I suppose I can post more info if people want to see it, but it's about 10 pages of stuff. Maybe I'll scan it in...
Mike Caprio, mikecap@nospamworld.stdspam.com
Mike Caprio, mikecap@nospamworld.stdspam.com
Digital Renaissance Man - Writer, Coder, & Artist
-Legion
I don't know, under 2k, my parallel zip is slow as shit and reading from the drive consumes nearly 95% of cpu resources.
This is because by default win2k does not assign an IRQ to the parralel port. Go to the port properties, tell it to use an IRQ and it will use less CPU and be alot faster.
This helps alot for printing too...
Andre060
To this day there is no LS-120 SCSI drives, but there is a company that makes an LS-120 adapter to plug an IDE drive into a SCSI chain, for the life of me I can't remember who it is though.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
I thought the CEO said publicly iomega would replace even the out of warranty zip drives that died due to CoD. Well, their customer service said it was my OEM's problem. (Yeah, I know, the classic run-around.) But shame on me if I ever patronize iomega.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
What was the funniest?
--
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
Sure does! My damn drive hasn't worked in over a year. What a waste. I'll pay the $3.50 to mail it back for a $30-$40 rebate.
Besides, with the current state of CD Writer and Re-Writers why would I want to carry around a 100 Mb (or even 250 Mb) hunk of disk. My thesis won't even fit on that!
That product exists today (well, for $200, you can get a 40 GB one) in the form of external USB and firewire drives. External drives were always very prevalent in the mac world, but never caught on much in the PC world because there was no good standardized external interface for them (parallel drive? ugh.)
I've been thinking of asking Fujitsu for some sort of compensation, but I assume they'd offer replacement drives and, quite frankly, I don't want them.
Andy Armstrong
Maybe the cigarette companies should have tried this tactic.
Yeah: Whoops, sorry, our cigarettes were indeed bad. Here's a $10 coupon on your next purchase.
I too am very upset that the rebate is for US customers only. What happens to those victims like me just north of the border (in Canada)? I have a "Click of death" Zip drive eating dust for more than 2 years, about 18 months after the purchase (after warranty expired, of course). I promised myself I would think twice before I buy anything from Iomega. Now, I would never buy and recommend my friends buy anything from Iomega.
The terms of the rebate aren't all that good, and the only ones who really win are the lawyers who filed the suit. Still, the terms are better than the Gateway 2000 class action suit over defective monitors, a few years back. You could get $6 towards the cost of a new Gateway monitor, or $12 towards the cost of a new Gateway computer. The lawyers got somewhere around a million dollars. In comparison to the GW2k class action, the Iomega one looks pretty good.
Hmmmm.... Maybe if I used my Zip drive to monitor the pressure in the tires on an SUV, I could get them to replace it instead of giving me a rebate on more junk I don't need.
Sounds like a good time to link to my diatribe about Iomega, the Jaz drive (which is also subject to the CoD) and Linux.
IBM drives are the best. Their drives retrieve data faster, operate quieter, generate less heat, and last longer than any other manufacturer's drives. Almost every other drive manufacturer uses PRML head technology that is licensed from IBM.
maru
I'm the not-so-proud owner of a parallel port ZIP drive, and though I've never had any trouble with it (besides it's horribly, horribly slow write speeds), I would feel very sorry for anyone who was offered this insultingly low settlement.
I got the letter about the settlement, and to get the $40 rebate, you have to buy a 250MB zip drive and six disks. Otherwise, you get a rebate of $17.50 to buy one Zip250, and only $12.50 for the 100 meg version.
Frankly, that sucks. I could probably find a better rebate at Office Depot, and I have no interest at all in buying a product that stores less than a CD-RW, writes slower than a CD-RW, and is less readable than a CD-RW, especially if said product is many times more expensive than a CD-RW.
Coupons are typical of a few past class action lawsuits. One was a video game company. People got a $5 coupon off a future game. Another was with Apple Inc and people got discounts on a future computer purchase. The lawyers get a good payout.
The coupons don't seem much better than you might get at a discount store.
Most people I know got their zips replaced after the click of death anyway.
- James - [IMAGE]
--G Barr
Sapere Aude - Homer
1. Rebate request form: of course you need proof of your claim, so be prepared.
2. Rinaldi Class Action Settlement: Iomega's page about the settlement, just because the information might be of use to some of you.
I hope that anyone looking for a rebate of any kind on a defective drive can find what they need!
I watched three drives labeled IBM with maxtor chipsets die within a year period. All were 2.1 gig UW scsi. Same goes for those 1.2 gig low profile seagate drives.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Has anyone had a replacement drive fail the same way?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
That's a joke right? You mean lawyers actually got PAIED to bring up something that, ahah, excuse me to say but, if iomega would have done a super-rebate to boost their sales, they would have lowered the price much more...
Shit right now not only this will not cost them anything, but they might actually profit from this. lol... who won the most? lawyers again.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I have a Iomega 100MB Zip Drive, and after 4 months that i bought it, all i got was bad disk, and other crazystuff.They said it was my drivers, well iut never was, so here is my salvation.
Still, the "generous" offer has at least told me all I need to know about buying Iomega stuff - don't.
Ah, _that_ must be what made it so 'informative'. sheesh
---
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Anybody know how this lawsuit will affect Iomega's financial situation? I know a few years ago at least they couldn't make money for anything despite the popularity of Zip and Jaz...has anything changed? Or are they even further down the tubes now than they were then. :)
Nothing against the work that these attorney's did on this class action (as I'm sure it took many hours of discovery and brief writing), but this settlement really stinks. Each customer gets a coupon worth up to $40 (but more like $5 or $10 for a reasonable purchase), but the attorney's get $4.7 million dollars in "fair and reasonable attorney's fees." That seems a tad unfair, don't you think? The settlement also calls for $1 million in donations to schools, but the settlement calls for 38% of that money to come from donations Iomega gives to schools. Go read the settlement, see for yourself ...
Rinaldi Class Action Proposed Settlement
I have one of those failing Maxtor drives. It works fine here most of the time, but if you put some heavy load on it it will make bad blocks. Not all Maxtors are like this, it was just a bad batch(March 2000), and im sure you could trade them in for a better one at the time. We didnt feel like bothering anyways, the problems are only minor for our home (parent infested) computer. I'd buy SCSI anyways
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
has a cool zip drive "monitoring" utility, as well as a shitload of info on why it happens -
the drive head somehow gets lodged into the disk or something at 2000 rpm or something - really destructive. Check his site.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Wonderful thing is that this is, as iomega claims, not an problem, but is a known issue. Thats what I'm pissed about. Windows 2k has been out for how long now? plus beta time? and iomega still hasn't got their shit together.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I'm assuming that the same thing would happen with a internal, but I don't take my internal to other places with me. I wonder how much abuse external things take.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Even though I burn most of my shit to cd when I leave, I can't burn at school my corrections etc...
Speaking of which, my skool should be very fucking happy right about now. Shit 500 x $40. Thats 20 grand of free shit.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Just another way for those darned attornies to get rich. Who really benefits here the most? consumer? hardly.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Isn't Iomega notoriously slow with rebate checks in the past? Kinda ironic (besides the obvious: getting a rebate because the product was defective to go out and buy more product from the same company)
*shrug*
E,
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Back 10 years ago, there were alwys horror stories about Connor drives. I still have mine, that I bought 10 1/2 years ago. I guess I was lucky...
(i.e. don't believe it until it happens to you)
FP.
--
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
that nealy neglects things that break CONSISTENLY after warranty has expired. IE from the use of substandard parts. The clutch in Apple's Wallstreet laptops is a prime example. When almost every single product on the market fails, thats a problem with design, wether or not the warranty is up, and responsible companies should be willing to work with the customer to resolve the issue.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
> That port was designed for PRINTERS, not for
> removable media. Spend a little bit more
> and get an internal IDE version, the external
> USB version, or god forbid, a SCSI Zip. You'll
> be much happier.
To use a SCSI Zip drive, you have to have a SCSI interface, and they're still pretty rare on home computers these days.
And if you have other SCSI devices, you need TWO SCSI interfaces, because the SCSI implementation on Zip drives (at least the Zip+, which is what I bought years ago) is so poor that the drive won't work reliably unless the Zip drive's the only device hanging off the SCSI bus.
Screw Iomega. I lost important data in college because half of the Zip drives in the computer labs infected my disks with CoD.
Dude, do you ever wonder why posts like this get modded down? Who wasted their time modding this down to 0?
Did you buy it before Jan 1, 1995? Some of those Click-of-Death websites claim that the problem mainly occurs with newer disks/drives. Presumably, manufacturing quality has slipped over time.
Last thing, really, why don't people use ls-120's? the disks are cheaper, the drives are cheaper and I think they work fairly well? Any ideas?
Short answer: the disks and drives are not, in fact, cheaper. The lowest price on pricewatch for a zip drive is $29. For an LS-120, $42. Disks cost about the same.
Not that people shouldn't use LS-120 anyway, but...
Does anyone else remember the class-action lawsuit brought againt Nintendo of America for unfair competetive practices? They got off with the same basic deal. They were supposed to reimburse game owners $5, but what you actually got was a coupon good for $5 off the next game you bought, or roughly 10% of the cost of a new game. And of course, the prices were just as high as they'd always been. And you only got one coupon, regardless of how many NES games you had bought... That hardly seems adequate...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
This is hardly a loss for Iomega. A $40 rebate from a company whose products average well over $100? If anything, this company is increasing its revenue stream. Sorry to the folks who have to live with this. Apparently you'll have to give them more of your money to get your "settlement" from these guys. Real smooth.
1). The person called for tech support on a Dell with a Zip drive. That person was calling from Iomega, the maker of the Zip drives.
2). Read the signature line...
I have an early SCSI Zip 100. It's been flawless. Then again, I don't pound the crap out of it either.
I received the class action lawsuit notification, and read through it carefully. The attorneys in the case are getting 4.7 million in fees. People who may have been affected by real problems are getting the chance to get a rebate on their next Zip drive. Whoop-tee-dooo!
CD-RW has made Zip obsolete. Iomega got off easy on this one.
Note this is the second class action lawsuit against Iomega in regards to Zip drives. The first one was for not deliving promised rebate checks & freebies on time back on the first batches of Zip drives in 1996 and 1997.
Was that many users could never get the damn drivers to work on their laptops. At least that was the case through 1998 when I finaly gave up. Too hit or miss for my taste.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
I agree that parallel ZIP drives aren't the best decision to buy, but I'm not sure the parallel port was DESIGNED for printing. I may be wrong, but that just doesn't strike me as being true. Plus, how the ZIP drive connects to the computer wouldn't affect the incidence of breakdown would it?? Not sure.
Um, ya know? If you just followed the link to Iomega's website rather than just breezing through the story before you enunciated profoundly on it, you would know that their page has a direct link to the ACTUAL SETTLEMENT with ACTUAL DETAILS about how to get YOUR REBATE. Enjoy your REBATE!!! (oh, and there's a bit in there about a 47 million dollar cash payout... so once we're all counted, we can pay for 20 minutes of long distance!!!) WOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!
Orange Whip? Orange Whip? Three Orange Whips!
Gibson Research Corporation has been following the "Click of Death" for a while and has been a player on the good-guy's side. He also has an application that will test if your ZIP drive suffers from the ailment.
Here's what you get if you can prove your drive is hosed (i.e. fill out and sign "under oath" the form that was sent with the notice):
$17.50 towards a Zip 250 Drive
$12.50 towards a Zip 100 Drive
$40.00 towards a Zip 250 and 6 pack of disks
$27.50 towards a Zip 100 and 6 pack of disks
$17.50 towards a 6 pack of Zip 250 disks
$12.50 towards a 6 pack of Zip 100 disks
$12.50 towards a Pocket Zip drive
$35.00 towards a Pocket Zip and 10 pack of disks
$22.50 towards a Pocket Zip and 4 pack of disks
If you don't fill out the 'proof' section of the form, you get one of these:
$10.00 towards a Zip 250 Drive
$5.00 towards a Zip 100 Drive
$25.00 towards a Zip 250 and 6 pack of disks
$12.50 towards a Zip 100 and 6 pack of disks
$10.00 towards a 6 pack of Zip 250 disks
$5.00 towards a 6 pack of Zip 100 disks
$5.00 towards a Pocket Zip drive
$17.50 towards a Pocket Zip and 10 pack of disks
$10.50 towards a Pocket Zip and 4 pack of disks
~Philly
It's not a software problem, but a hardware problem. No patch will fix the 'click of death'.
So why are you still using it? Why not return the piece of shit?
'nuff said
AC comments get piped to
No wonder IOmega is a fuckedcompany
AC comments get piped to
Much less use any rebates of theirs
AC comments get piped to
What suprises me is that we hold products that include hardware to such high standards, but don't demand (or are prepared to pay for) quality in software-only products.
Last year Toshiba confounded the industry by settling a class action law suit for over a billion. That was $210 to $433 in cash to owners of 5,000,000 Toshiba laptop or notebook computers as well as hundreds of dollars in coupons for more Toshiba products. I myself received $398.70 in cash, plus a coupon for $225 as well as a software patch for a notebook computer that was only bought for a $1,299.99 retail price.
And this was all over a theoretical floppy disk controller microcode bug that was never claimed to have been seen in normal use, and never now since floppys are obsolete. Even if Toshiba acted improperly in the handling of such a bug (it still denies this) I think this payout to be extremely unreasonable and leaves other hardware manufacturers having to insure against such litigation.
On the other hand when a software company puts out a product that will fail in 5 years due to a millenium bug, leaves the default security settings open to a virus or crashes unexpectedly, the best you could expect is a software patch (sometimes an upgrade at your cost), but never compensation.
I know software would be more expensive and slower to come out if it had fewer bugs. And I know those as is license agreements that effectively mean use at your own risk. But couldn't we all benefit os much from more quality in software or conversely less litigation over hardware?
BTW, don't feel bad if you didn't make your claim from Toshiba (it's too late now). Any uncollected money is meant to go to charity.
no, that would not be "fp"... stupid. Slashdot should have an option to filter out goatsex and fp.
samrolken
That's so odd. I knew a few people at my old job who disliked Maxtor, yet I've used three of them that are still kicking fine. The only reason I upgraded was due to increasing space demands on my part. The 800M I got years ago is still chugging along nicely in my old 486. I must be lucky.
someone else mentioned this as well, but most CD-writers support CD-RW discs. This will allow you to format a CD-RW to act exactly like a floppy (or zip) disc. There are appropriate redirectors available in every major OS (not enabled by default, usually) to make this very transparent. No employee retraining is necessary either because it acts just like a big 570MB floppy disc.
However, the issue with compatibility is a big one. CD-RW discs can not be read in most CD-ROM drives. But then, zip discs can not be read in most computers, so you can not really say that one is any more compatible with another. If you really need compatibility, CD-writers have the ability to write to CD-R media. This gives them a big advantage over other types of removable media imho.
Amongst my friends it's been exactly the opposite; two of my friends lost important data when their internal zip drives broke. They replaced the drives with externals and they've been okay since.
My external broke once too, but it wasn't the click of death. For some reason any computer I would plug it into wouldn't recognize it; luckily I was able to exchange it for a new one.
I was a little excited at first when I saw there was a $40 debate; although I don't have a need for any Iomega hardware, I could've got a few extra ZIP disks (they're expensive as hell anyway). From the looks of the offer though, it seems the rebates don't go toward any old product you want, only specified amounts for specific products. Here's what the posted notice says:
$17.50 for a Zip 250 drive
$12.50 for a Zip 100 drive
$40.00 for a Zip 250 drive and a 6 pack of ZIP 250 disks
$27.50 toward Zip 100 drive and a 6 pack of ZIP 100 disks
$17.50 toward the purchase of six ZIP 250 disks
$12.50 toward the purchase of six ZIP 100 disks . . .
There's some more but you get the idea. The rebate doesn't really reimburse anybody, just offers some incentives to buy more Iomega products; the more expensive the product the greater the discount.
I was going to fill in a request hoping I could use the $40 and buy like three or four ZIP disks, but since I'll only get $12.50 off for a pack of six, which probably costs $50 anyway, this offer seems pretty lame.
I saw some people asking why on earth anyone would use a ZIP drive in 2001. At my university the computers in the lab have zip drives, sometimes it's a convenient way to get stuff larger than 1.44MB back and forth between home and school. As far as home use though I never touch it.
ZIP drives are like the 8 tracks of computer media, I expect that they'll be dead in a short amount of time.
I would hope that they fixed it a few years ago when this problem first started happening. I remember about two years ago seeing tons of refurbished ZIP drives for sale in stores; the fact that there were some serious problems with the drives should've been obvious.
Has anyone had problems with drives bought within the past year or so? Mine has been okay, but if Iomega never considered it a "problem" then they might not have fixed them until last month.
I have my drive sitting on a shelf above my computer desk; the drive ejects so hard that the disk usually flys out of the drive and five feet onto the ground. Why in the hell do these drives eject so hard?
I worked at Cisco on the support team and I was constantly asked why Zip drives were not supported materials by us techs. I never had an answer but now i wonder if Cisco honchos knew a little more about them than we did.... Quite curious, Mike
FP FOOLS How could you get all excited by doing that? It didn't take skill or intelligence. You even posted anonymously in your attempt to show off! What a moronic loser!
Gibson Research's Click-o-Death detector pretty useful. too bad i got screwed out of my rebate because of the date i bought my zip drives... f*cking new ones i own don't have that problem. wasn't this mostly noticed through the parallel port ones? i haven't heard of many drives going bad through ide, only disks.
If this was a lawsuit against Microsoft, would it be something like:
"Customers will get up to $40 in rebates with the purchases of Windows XP and Office XP"
Hmm.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
This doesn't seem to me to be the fault of the lawyers or the judicial system. If you want to blame someone blame anyone who accepts the rebate because only then are they accepting the class action judgement. If you take away all the legalese basicly you have a scenario where Iomega has made an offer (we will give you this rebate if you release us of any further liability.) If people don't accept this offer (by opting out of the Class) then the deal is pointless. Ofcourse this is all intellectual because most people will take the rebate. But this isn't the fault of judges or lawyers or our even the system. If you have to blame something blame the short sitedness of the public.
Rinaldi Class Action Settlement
You get credit at the Iomega store. You also have some rights with respect to accepting the settlement. IANAL, but for those who are, there's a big section on "excluding yourself from the class action lawsuit", in case you want to litigate your own terms.
Me? I'll see if I can use my rebate to by iomega brand CD-Rs. My zip drive hasn't been plugged into the SCSI bus since I got a burner and broadband.
Art At Home
I love this, there is someone always there two spellcheck your poasts.
Get your Unix fortune now!
This is a great example of what the drive does.
I really don't think a rebate is a decent pay-off. I know someone above pointed out that the lawyers got cash, we all know that. But; this is a lame deal.
I shelled out $200 for a drive, got a rebate later on for $50 dollars. Bought a pack of five disks (maybe 6) which are the same price now; and all I get is a $40 rebate.
I want a new parallel drive. F''k the fancy 250 MB Drive - why would I ask for more than what I've lost.
And I'm sure there is a section of a license thingy (by opening the box no doubt) somewhere I agreed to and that will keep me from crying about the data I've lost.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Isn't it ironic that they have disks failing at a high rate (and 1% IS high), and yet they advertise "CDs for music - Zip for important stuff". How many CD burners have a 1% failure rate? (not counting buffer underruns)
The LAWYERS probably settled for a few million for themselves.... They don't give a shit about the other people...
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
When I started looking for removable storage in late 1997, the Zip was $US 150-200, and Jaz was much pricier. A decent SCSI burner package, including the controller, was $600. Then I figured: Hey, I can store more than a GB on CD for about $4, vs. $150 on Zip, or $100 on Jaz!
A couple hundred CD-R's later... I'm definitely happier without that stupid purple drive.
--
I've long since given up the notion of one hard drive make being better than another. Every major brand has died on me at some point or another.
--
Right. This kind of settlement is an obscene gesture to consumers. A settlement in rebates... for future purchases?
Blame the judge on the case, though. This kind of agreement is slowly being considered unacceptable by some, but not all. A recent case - I'm sorry I can't remember which - DID require the attorneys to take much of their fee in the coupons they negotiated for consumers.
Someone should file a class-action suit against some of these class-action law firms.
Do any of you think that IOMega is making money off their drives? The old adage "you sell the razors, i'll sell the blades" The disks are the only thing that IOM should be using to make money off of. However, all of their recording media is overpriced. What does a Zip disk cost, $10 or so? For 100meg! With CD burners coming as standard on new computers, and a RWCD costing about $1 for over 600meg, it makes IOMega look like gougers that are ripping off the dummies that were stupid enough to buy their drives. Be aware IOMega, the "dummies" have a way at getting even with a vengence in a rapidly changing free market.
Can't people sue Microsoft like this for their crappy and hanging software?
I agree with you about the parts of the rebates, but I said what I said and nothing more. I HAVE NOT HAD A PROBLEM YET. I'm not saying that there is no problem, or that no problems exist anywhere. I am simply stating that my drive, my OLD drive (has gone through 4 computers so far) has yet to fail me, or even "click" once. (Am I the only one that finds it ironic that Iomega makes a drive called "click"?).
:p Either way, it works, I'm happy, and that's that.
Maybe it IS defective in the sense that it works, I don't know.
Speaking of data recovery, I've always been curious about it. Does anyone know any professional data recovery techniques, or any resources that I can find out more about them?
Do I get a rebate for my Zip drive if I realize (now) that it's totally useless and I'll never use it?
I received an email last week detailing how to claim. Basically there is a form, and you have to have claim to have had a problem or not. Even if you haven't had a problem , you can still get vouchers , but for less. I assume that since I downloaded software from their site and registered that that is why I recieved the notice. This is the second zip drive I have had. The first one did suffer occasionally from the click of death, and the $40 will about cover the cost of the 2 disks I threw away. But since I have a CDRW now, I have no use for the voucher ! (And thats why it's vouchers , not cash, their market is shrinking by the day). And for who said about cheap media greater tha in size than a floppy, figure this .... zip drive each disk $16->$19 each, 100MB (200 Compressed) or 250MB (450 Compressed ?)- CDRW - 540MB - I buy in Jewel case for 79c.
Andy
Strangely enough, I've never had a problem with any of my 3 Zip drives. However, for over a decade I've been amazed at the poor the reliability of floppy disks. In my experience (on dozens of computers), a full 1.44 MB copy fails about 5% of the time. This is on a technology that has had 25 years to work out the bugs. This is total bullshit.
I avoid sneaker netting when possible, but sometimes you have to use a removable disk. I was using a floppy a couple of weeks ago because in my (justifiable) paranoia, I set Zone Alarm to make it nearly impossible to share files between the machines in question. Yet again, the files that were supposedly placed on the floppy by machine A were unreadable on machine B. I'm normally a calm person, but this time, I cracked.
Without even realizing what I was doing, I yanked the disk out and physically ripped it in half with my bare hands. I was surprised that it was so easy to rip the hard plastic shell. The scary part is, that stainless steel sliding cover got twisted and popped off, exposing its sharp corners. It cut a nasty gash in my wrist, right over the vein. I was pretty lucky that it didn't cut deeper.
Zip disks may suck too, but I think Iomega is to be commended for creating a removable disk that appears to be constructed too sturdily to pose such a safety hazard.
I had a ZIP drive in my laptop for almost a year, no problems..... I prefer CD-R's though... CoasterCount.com
TODO: Something witty here...
Um, why should it be so odd? My understanding is that not all the drives were defective, and defects were not making the drives totally unusable (if they had been unusable, it would have been covered by a warranty). So why should the company give you back all the money (essentially giving you the drive free)? Of course, I understand the desire of an average /. guy to receive everything free but consider these two facts, for example:
1) All software will never be free
2) It is virtually impossible to create absolutely bug-free software.
Does that mean that we should ask the price of a software package back every time we see a bug and make all software companies go bankrupt this way? Of course not. Then why should it be different in this case?
When men used to be men
Mmmm... kicking Vanilla Ice...
Can u get this rebate in Canada? If so, how exactly do you go about getting the rebate?
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Is the click of death more common in external zip drives? I have an internal zip drive and it's been working fien for 3+ years.
My theory is that external drives get moved around more so the parts inside start loosening up and will fall out resulting in the click of death. But internal drives just sit in one spot and never move, so all the parts stay intact.
"the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached to it." - Grandpa Simpson
Their hardware never ceases to amaze me with its ability to suddenly break itself. At my workplace in a university library computing center, every computer has a Jaz and Zip drive, and they are rarely ever working right. Lately the Jaz drives have taken to erratically blinking lights for no good reason. It's great.
Now if only they'ld pay for the paper I lost.
The data lost on those disks can be worth far more than $40.
Admit it - the only reason this got so far is because of whiny gits complaining of lost data. Imbeciles - all of them.
Unmuzzled power corrupts, unmuzzledly.
Their time will come.
God loves to see His children prosper and create wealth. God does not love lawsuits.
I fear for my nation.
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
I don't have a clue when I bought mine, but my guess is it was some time before the Internal IDE drive came into existence, because I had to buy a SCSI controller to handle it (external SCSI). Aside from my primary computer now not having a spare ISA port to put the controller in (the Zip drive being useless now), the thing hasn't experienced the "click of death" once. Of course, that isn't to say my Zip disks haven't been crap, I've had situations where I'd lose half the data off the drive in a single use for no reason, but I suppose removable magnetic media is always prone to such foulups (floppy disks in the backpack, anyone?)
I have to agree with you. I got the same letter in the mail yesterday and took a look at it, and then tossed it. Why?
How the hell is this going to compel me to buy another Iomega product, as well as something else that I don't need? Considering 100MB is almost nothing when it comes to storage space, and it's cheaper to just buy an internal IDE drive from some manufacturer like Western Digital (in my opinion, WD = more reliable than Maxtor, I've bought a total of about 30 of them and only one has failed, partly my fault cuz I dropped it). If Iomega starts making internal IDE drives, how would they expect any of their former customers to buy them? I certainly wouldn't want my new internal hard drive having clicks of death. I already have enough problems with blue screens of death. Heh.
It would have to be more of a utility limitation on removable disks. Anyone and everyone who owns a computer from at least the mid-nineties has a CD-ROM drive in it, and both CD-R and CD-RW media work in them fine. With proprietary "solutions" (or lack thereof) like those from Iomega, you have to buy a separate drive and possibly a controller for it, then buy the media, and if there's any data trading involved that doesn't involve the Internet (and make having these things pointless, IMO), you gotta hope that the other guy has the same proprietary hardware.
:)
Then of course, Iomega for some odd reason has these unproportional prices for Zip and Jaz media that don't make sense when you consider the competition. Sure, you can write to them repeatedly (provided they work), but there isn't enough space to justify it. You walk into a store, you see on one shelf a rack full of Iomega Zip100 disks, something like $12 a piece. Then on another rack, you see 70-minute write-once CDs in cases of 25 for $10. Now, which one makes more sense? Buy one disk and have 1.4% the total space of one of those 70-minute write-once CDs that you could get for 3.3% the cost? I mean, if you screw up one write-once CD, you just toss it (or use it as a coaster) and write another one. If you screw up a Zip100 disk (and provided you can rewrite to them, "screw up" == the disk starts clicking, equivalent to a CD-R's buffer underrun in terms of total data lost in one fell swoop), you're sunk one disc and $12.
I know I'm probably just proving your point, though.
Why only a hockey puck? Why not rip the drive apart to the point that you can use the platters as coasters?
I know, it's uneconomical compared to using AOL CDs or CD-R's your drive spat out with buffer underruns, but it works.
well in my case it was the glue holding the wire going to the upper drive head had come loose, as the head snaps back and forth during reads, the wire broke, I was able to fix that and the zip drive has been fine since, that was 4 years ago, a friend of mine actually had one of the heads shear off though faulty media.
I tried doing this as well, and I still have the problem of huge CPU usage, but on top of that it was using OVER 512 megs of RAM, and about 1/2 of my available swap file space just to access the damn drive. This only happens when you download the Iomega wear bullshit, if you use the built in win2k drivers while you lose some of the special features it doesnt make your machine run like a 386...
This company is not famous for "giving it up",I went through hell to get my rebate when I bought the thing. I don't think I'll live long enough to see another rebate. I've since lost the box it came in that they porbably want back along with the original receipt.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Sounds like the best policy is whack it, freeze it, crack it. Even if it doesn't recover the data, it's at least satisfying.
Hold the drive about 1.5" above a counter, hit the power. After the first drive spins up, and before the POST completes, wack the bad drive down onto the bench with authority, but not malice.
If that doesn't do it, as a very last resort, open the drive and physically move the heads. Put it back together. Power it on, and make backup immediatly. Now that dust has gotten in, the clock is ticking fast, but the drive was as good as dead anyway.
I've recovered several drives for people that way.
If you need legal advice, contact an attorney
licensed in your own jurisdiction.
Class actions do not primarily benefit the class,
but the attorneys "for" the class. Coporations
throw money at these to get rid of them, whether
or not they have merit--this is why the attorneys
file them. It is *very* rare for the class
members to get damages that make them whole; they
usually get a pittance while the attorneys are
well paid. Ironically, the only exception that I
can name is the prior Iomega class action over
the rebates wherein we got (albeit two years
late) the rebates promised in the first place,
the "stuff," and an extra disk.
Corporations *like* settling these with
coupons/rebates. It's cheap, and gets you more
business. It doesn't mean that they think
there's a chance a trial. Remember the
"exploding" fuel tanks on GM pickup trucks?
While they were twice as likely to go off as
ford/chrysler tanks, 1) it was still extremely
rare, 2) the placement was how they carried so
bloody much fuel, 3) they were still less than
half as likely to go off as a passenger car fuel
tank in a similar collision. GM happily through
around coupons to get it to go away.
A coupon/rebate settlement doesn't suggest the
corporation was wrong (nor that it was right, but
a class action tends to suggest that
that it was cheaper to "advertise" in this way
than to litigate.
hawk, esq.
p.s. Is the click of death the same thing as
thwacking the partition table of any disk
inserted? I pulled mine out of service when it
started doing that.
Looking through my copy of the papers... "Iomega denies any liability or wrongdoing which is alleged in the Complaint, but has decided to enter into this settlement in order avoid[sic] the costs and burdens associated with continuing the litigation." A settlement which requires everyone to buy more Iomega products... They have some GREAT lawyers...
The various rebates you can get range from $12.50 off on a pack of six Zip100 disks to $40 off on a Zip 250 drive with 6 zip250 disks if you submit "proof of manifestation" (you swear you had click-o-death), or from $5 to $25 on the same stuff if you didn't. And free technical support for ten months!
The best part though is that Iomega is required to donate $1,000,000 worth of Zip drives & disks to K-12 schools... That's right, donate DEFECTIVE HARDWARE TO CHILDREN!!!!
No, not true. the BEST part is "d. Cash Payment -- Iomega shall pay to the Class in settlement of the Class Claims an amount up to $4.7 million, or such lesser amount that the Court may approve, which amount shall be designated for Class Counsel's reasonable attorney's fees and expenses." (emphasis added) Lawyers are making OVER FOUR MILLION DOLLARS off this suit, while the people (supposedly) harmed by Iomega's actions get COUPONS for products from a company we don't trust. What a good deal.
Of course, the settlement still has to be approved by the court, so who knows...
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
A lot of people posted here that they never had these problems, but I'm sure they will take the rebates.
I personally won't, mainly because I can't think for the life of me what I'd do with them. :) I already have more Zip disks than I'll ever need (I just use them to copy files between home and school) and have access to two drives if one of them fails.
I'm kinda (really; really) pissed that the dumb ass lawyers settled for rebates.
Lawyers have a bad rep here on slashdot, but they are smarter than you think - they're not being paid with rebates, they get cold, hard cash. $4.7 million of it if the court approves... If you REALLY don't like it, you can appear at the court hearing and ask the judge to alter their compensation. :) June 8, 2001, at 10 am, in the Superior Court of Delaware, 1020 N. King Street, Wilmington, DE 19801.
Will the USB zip drive work with linux?
Supposedly... http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/showdv.php3?id=28
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
"Lift the front 2 inches and drop it" was one of the standard "percussive maintenance" techniques when I was doing tech support 10 years ago.
What freezing does is contract all the metal parts, and of course different metals contract different amounts, so this changes the physical location of them relative to one another, breaking the "stiction" bond.
You can accomplish the same thing in the other direction by causing all the metal parts to expand (at different amounts for different metals) by heatng the drive. Just set it over the vents on top of a monitor for a few hours and let it slowly bake. Disconnect the drive from the computer and all electrical connectors first, of course. After it's good and warm, take it off of the monitor and let it cool. Set it on a flat surface and play "spin the bottle". The heads will move with the body but the platters can spin independently, and will, which will break any remaining adherence between the heads and the platters.
Sometmes this method will not only let you rescue your data, but return the drive to good operating condition and let you keep on using it for another year or two or three.
Also, this method keeps the heads and/or platters from bouncing up and down in the vertical plane and only causes them to move relative to each other in the horizontal plane, which, of course, they are designed to do.
I've had the best luck not having problems in the first place with Maxtors and Western Digitals, the worst with Conners, and Quantums and Seagates somewhere in the middle. That's with the drives themselves. What MS software does to the data I don't blame the hardware for. There's nothing quite like having to hex edit 8.4 G :-(
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Are you still using electrical current? Don't you know photons are what's happenin' now?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Oops, sorry, I just meant the speed thing and the CPU utilization, which are typical of the parallel port Zip drives.
The Click of Death is a real problem, I administer some university computer labs, and there's nothing worse than having it spread throughout your labs, then having to deal with the associated complaints from those who didn't have any backups of their important data. It does/did strike all versions of the Zip drives, but thankfully, the newer models don't seem affected...
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
By 1997, the benifits were certainly leaning towards CD-R. However, I got my Zip when they first came out in 1994 or 1995. In those days a common hardrive was 500MB, which meant that you could back up your entire system for $100, and easily carry around every datafile on your disk on a single disc with the Win95 CAB files to spare. Super-cheap compared to the old Syquest 88MB stuff. It was pretty cool in the day.
However the costs of Zip/Jaz/Any Removable versus fixed disks just got worse and worse over time, while CD-R just got better and better. I don't know if this is due to some sort of engineering limitation on removable disks, or if it's just that Iomega et al feel that they'll never win versus cheap CD-R and DVD-R media so they've given up.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Right on. However, put yourself in 1994: Removable hard disk storage 1/5 the size of your main hard drive for $250. You have a 14.4 modem and there are no freedrive sites on the net. If you were a Mac user, they were virtually ubiquitous, making trading easy.
This thing was essentially the Mac "floppy" of the day, and still to this day, to the extent that Mac users need floppies. There was a similar fleeting opportunity to standardize on LS-120 on PCs, but the big OEMs wanted to chase the insanely low price-point of $1500 (!), and it ended up on the cost-cutting room floor.
The equivalant product today would be 10GB and fast enough to run Windows 2000 off of for $200. Hell, if that was on the market, I'd be there in a second. But who's going to design such a thing, only to be steamrolled by cheap writable DVD-9 media in a few years.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
My memory can verify that IDE LS-120 drives were on the market in 1995. Can't recall, but I imagine that SCSI was also available, however the LS-120 seemed to be primarily marketed towards OEMs in the beginning. Compaq even shipped them as standard equipment for maybe a month or two before realizing that that extra couple bucks per machine was costing them.
Of course, by this time the Zip had a full head of steam going, especially among the Mac crowd, who quickly replaced the "service bureau-standard" 5.25 Syquest drives they were using. That spread to the PC crowd when the parallel Zip was released, and the LS-120 pretty much hasn't gone anywhere since.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
You had to have known that you were making a tradeoff when you bought the parallel version instead of the SCSI version. The whole point of the parallel version is that it is for extremely low end systems for people who don't care much about performance. If they cared, they would have SCSI ports.
The biggest reason is network effects; it spreads the same way as MS Excel and MS Word. The only reason I bought a Zip drive was because one of my friends had one, and also my dad had one. (The more drives there are around to read it, the more useful a removable disk is. Know what I mean?) Then later I bought a Mac for my lil' brother, and decided to to put a Zip in it. Because Zips rule? No, I did it because me and dad already had Zips. Then my boss at work was thinking of getting some kind of removable media drive, I thought, "It would be neat to be able to move stuff back 'n' forth with work," so guess what I recommended... I never really evaluated the Zip vs other brands like SyQuest in terms of technical merit. Once I saw that Zips were "good enough," then the network effects became a lot more important than a few percentage points in performance, or ten bucks in the price of the drive.
(And they really were "good enough" in my experience. Of my friend's Zip, the two of my dad's, the two of mine, my brother's, and my employer's, there hasn't been a single failure. Of all 7 units I've seen, all 7 are still in action. If it weren't for the 'Net, I wouldn't even know these drives have such an aweful reputation and how lucky I've been.)
As for LS120, I think they came out lot later, when the battle was already over. Also, if I recall, they used a weird interface (PeeCee floppy or IDE?) at a time when SCSI was the only real standard. If SCSI LS120 drives had gotten onto the market by 1995 (are they even available yet?) then perhaps things would have gone differently.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
So, in order to redeem the "Settlement" you have to buy a new zip product directly from iomega. Iomega's store overcharges by quite a bit ... an external zip 100mb drive is $114 from them, $74 from the lowest place on pricewatch. Great, I'll get right on that order guys.
I'd disagree with that somewhat. It's a lot less of a hassle to turn a floppy into a boot disk than it is to burn a CD. And rescue floppies are anything but useless.
Since you are talking about the resgistry, I'm guessing you are a windows-only human (altho, I could be wrong). However, floppy utilities such as Tom's Root Boot are an invaluable resource for Linux users.
As a bit of an aside, I recently purchased a G4 for use in my music pursuits. It doesn't have a floppy. Which wouldn't be so bad, except for the fact that the opcode drivers only ship on floppies, making it a bit of a hassle to load them onto the G4 (assuming I ever find the damn things in this appartment of mine).
Speaking of which, have you bought any Maxtor drives lately? They still ship their installation software only on floppies. Presumably this is because there are machines out there that have BIOSes that won't let you boot from CD.
So, altho I think that floppies are a hold-over from previous generations of technology, they do still serve a purpose. And will continue to do so for some time yet.
P.S Does anybody out there happen to have copies of the drivers and software for the Opcode Studio64X? Please, Please, Pretty Please? :)
Been living in a cave at all, recently?
There's such a thing as UDF, packet-writing.. Google is your friend for that shit, it's 2 am here and I'm gonna go to sleep, yeah..
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
So don't buy nuclear reactors with a 3 month warranty!
Of course manufacturers aren't going to produce stuff that outlives the warranty by tens of years..
But hey, feel free to buy that carton of milk and bitch when it actually DOES turn sour a month after the sell-by date..
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I kid you not. That was their solution. I called them, bitched loudly, and was offered a SCSI zip drive. When I pointed out I didn't have scsi in the PC they threw in the card.
Be glad you missed the ZipPlus; it was a POS.
-'fester
Umm, I beg to differ. I bought the scsi version, and I most certainly have the click of death. The drive worked superbly for three years, and now most of my backed-up data is lost.
With my zip-drive, the click of death did two very specific things. First, it made it impossible to read/write any data to/from zip disks. But what really upset me was the second thing it did. Any disk I placed in the zip drive was destroyed! I don't know what physical malfunction caused the click of death, but my guess is that it was some instrument scraping against the media within the disk. I lost a lot of important backup data (thankfully the originals still existed in some cases) because after the click of death, no other functional zip drives could read my zip disks.
It is incredibly annoying (and this is an understatement) when you go to read backup data, and have that backup data destroyed instead.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
IOmega is a fucked company
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Someone has to tell the judge that these settlements are worthless to all but the "class" attorneys (who like to raise the paper value of the coupons so it looks as though their fees are a reasonable percentage of the "settlement value," but are perfectly willing to remind the defendants in negotiations how few class members are likely to cash in their coupons).
-- Openlaw: Fighting for fair use and the public domain
Though I got it long after the date mentioned - I don't have any intention of trying to get and rebate, or whatever it is.
I have a parallel port 100 meg model - the things I like about it, above a CD-RW:
1. The drive is cheap.
2. The drive is durable (I throw mine in my backpack all the time, no probs).
3. It is portable.
I have yet to see a CD-RW on every machine I go to, especially at my workplace - we have a few, but only on "management's" machines - never on normal developers boxes. So, when I need to pull down a bunch of stuff, I bring in my ZIP drive.
That thing has been abused to hell and back - I even got a few burn/melt marks on it from soldering near it.
I will say the cost of media sucks - but buying or building a portable parallel port CD-RW drive is not my idea of cheap, yet (though it is rapidly falling to below $200 - which is about right)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
> The 1.5G Syjet is a Turkey. I've been through 2 drives and 6G worth of lost data...
Hear, hear!! I've also lost 3 gigs (2 disks) of data too. A similiar rebate wouldn't do much good though, since after the 2nd disk that was thrshed, I stopped using it, and switched over to CD-R.
The advantage of Iomega over CD's is that you can use it as a hard-drive in that you can edit a file inline. On a CD you have to re-burn the CD when you change a file.
IMHO, the main advantage of CD's are that they are portable (every computer has a CD reader), and probably more reliable.
...so, are you saying this problem doesn't exist? Gee, you sound just like Iomega support when I called.
I bought a drive years ago from exabyte in a so-called 'nest' hot-swappable kit. I had several disks go bad on me with this "click death", and I lost some data and was pretty put-out. Exabyte support referred me to Iomega who gave me the royal run-around.
In the end I gave up and the drive is sitting on a closet shelf somewhere.
I got my letter in the mail yesterday. When I first started the 4 pages of legalese, I was expecting to get some small cash settlement in exchange for some proof of purchase or something.
BUT, I was apalled to find out that the 'proposed settlement' is for rebates on iomega product purchases!?
You gotta be fscking kidding me! To get any remedy at all for this defective product, I am expected to buy something else and hope to get a rebate?
I'm more cheesed-off now than when I went round with Iomega on this in the first place! I had completely forgotten about this whole thing, this does nothing for me now except to remind me of how putrid Iomega was about all of this!
---
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Nope. They aren't admitting anything.
"Iomega denies any liability or wrongdoing which is alleged in the Complaint..."
Man I hope this settlement is rejected, not because I'm hoping to finally get my defective drive replaced, but because I want to see these rat-bastards get raked over the coals.
Wonder what the likelyhood of the plaintiffs actually winning this suit, and what the judgement would be? Hell, this 'settlement' is nothing (well, maybe the lawyers are getting paid).
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There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
The reason they never had a chance at doing this is because they wouldn't drop the price of their disks.
Think about it. A floppy disk today is between free and $.10 at most. You don't care if you give one to someone you don't know, and therefore don't care if you get it back or not. Drivers for new devices come on floppies still, because they don't add any cost to a product.
A zip disk, on the other hand, still costs up to $10. If I give one to someone, I only do it if I know that I'll get it back.
It's not disposable because of the cost, and this is the achilles heel that they never broke free of.
If they had dropped the price down to even $1-$2, licensed it to any manufacturer other than Sony, and made a few pennies off the billions of disks made and sold, they would have come out ahead, and we wouldn't still be giving away floppy disks.
I would today have the floppy drive replaced in every one of my machines, knowing that driver disks for my spiffy new hardware devices will be on a zip disk inside the package, instead of a floppy.
But, alas, zip disks are still up to $10, and therefore relegated to trading with my one or two close friends. This does not qualify as the "floppy replacement;" but merely one that could have been.
coldmist
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
[Please note the statements below only represent my opinions, and may not be entirely accurate, although they do represent my personal recollection of transpired events]
I returned my drive to IoMega under warranty. It took ONE HOUR and FOURTY FIVE MINUTES to get an RMA number over the phone. Note this is NOT an 800 number, it is a long distance call to Utah. I am in Canada. Also note that this was in '96 while long distance to the US cost like $0.75 a minute during business hours (the only time they are open). And note that shipping a Zip Drive to Utah, the only repair joint on Earth, costs about $100 US in shipping fees from Canada. And lets not forget the fact I spent 30 minutes before that 1.75 hours trying to use their horribly broken automated support, which assumed YOU were at fault for everything.
Total cost to me: $100 shipping fees. $100 phone call. Total cost for a new zip drive in '96? $200.
The shipping cost could have been avoided by simply having a repair depot in the country where you sell the product (Canada -- I reccomend Toronto/Missisagua). And no one should ever have to wait more than 10 minutes on hold if you have no 800 number! This is just basic business sense. I blame 100% of these costs on IoMega.
Face it, IoMega has to be the WORST company on earth. Hell, their website couldn't even be viewed with Lynx back in '95 (and YES, that certainly was a valid browser back then!). It was [IMAGE] this and [FRAME] that. It loaded slower than slashdot ever has. I spent, starting at 6:00 pm, FIVE HOURS attempting to download their 5 MB update over a T1. It came in so slow I assumed they were connecting using a 300 baud modem. Then, in the middle of that 5 hours it STOPPED. And DISCONNECTED. In total, it took me 3 attempts, FIVE HOURS each, to get all that damn software (it was the update to make the drive work in win '95, since the DOS drivers were useless). The software finally finished downloading when I came back from school, 4:00 pm!
I won't even get into the fact that I had to drive to the largest city in Canada (Toronto) to buy the only 5 zip disks left in that entire city (well, that was my guess since I phoned 20 retailers, of which two had one, and one retailer had three left). It was easier to find illicit drugs than zip disks in 95-96!
I suppose I could have ordered them direct for just $100 in long distance telephone fees...
I think they should (although they won't) burn in hell for being worse than Acer, Packard Bell, and Compaq combined. This settlement seems like a great first step.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
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I don't know, under 2k, my parallel zip is slow as shit and reading from the drive consumes nearly 95% of cpu resources.
According to iomega, this is not a problem. Moreover, they do not support the parallel port speed accelerator.
Great, I got slow as shit transfers - one hundred meg disk takes about 15 minutes to read data off of, about the same time to transfer data to.
This also is, according to iomega, not a problem.
The fuckers never respond to tech support email, you have to call them or send them actual letters - you know - like on paper. WTF is with that??
I never got their fucking rebate for my zip too, I'm still out $50, so even with these "rebates", which will probably be in the form of coupons, i.e. $40 off $100 purchase, maybe not, but it would fit their pattern of customer support, I'll still be out money.
That said, some of their other stuff is cool - i.e. the pocket zip - really cool. Those disks take a shitload of abuse, and I've never had one break on me or lose data - unlike the zip. I've lost one drive to the click of death, and about 4 disks to various reasons.
I'm not suprised that someone had to take this company to court because iomega could not resolve a technical problem in house.
One thing - why is the suit only for people who bought from 98-01, I bought one before that, it died to click of death. I hope to get my $40 though, cause I bought another one during 99.
Oh well. We will see how this works out. Hopefully people wont have to take them to court to actually get the refunds.
Last thing, really, why don't people use ls-120's? the disks are cheaper, the drives are cheaper and I think they work fairly well? Any ideas?
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
For those who do not know Steve Gibson, he originally got his chops as the original writer of Spinrite, one of the first drive recovery tools of the PC. He has a number of neat little free tools on his website. they are all written in assembly language.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Remember one of your favorite companies that got shareware authors to release their software for free in exchange for including an ad client that watched where you went on the Internet? They also got sued. Their settlement? You can purchase a discounted version of Go!Zilla Plus through them, which I believe is actually the registered version one of their products.
If you believe you once used a product with the Auriate/Radiate ad client, and believe you might be entitled to the aforementioned discounted version of Go!Zilla, the page to determine this is titled "Class Action", and may be found off of Radiate's privacy disclosure. They used to be called Auriate until a series of negatively slanted stories came out about them (or, so several articles have led me to believe).
Note I did not this link to this page directly because they redirect you to their privacy policy page first anyway. Please don't take advantage of their offer unless you really *really* installed a product that used their ad client; I don't feel like being sued for posting this.
And HP issued a rebate (for the entire price) last year because their first year's batch of external CDROM writers would not work. Refunding the whole price makes a lot of sense. (Except in the case of HP they made out like bandits --- I and some colleagues at a prior firm purchased a few for the office. By the time the rebates came out we had already abandoned the machines and as is the case with most large corporate American businesses, no one has bothered to redeem the rebate. So HP got off scott free.)
Heck, we even bought some Zip drives and I know no one is going to request a rebate at that firm. Iomega knows it will only get requests from a few users.
In any case, my only real point is this: Zip technology is very yesterday and proprietery. Anyone in their right mind today would instead buy a CDRW unit with rewritable CDs.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
I bought a 100MB ZIP a few years ago and it did the clicking thing but I didn't think much of it. The literally within a week after the warranty ended, I ejected a disk and the read/write heads came out with the disk like the guts from a squashed bug. But last year I bought a 250MB internal and it has been working flawlessly for backups every week.
I feel kinda sorry for Iomega sometimes though. There really isn't any use for ZIP drives these days. You can't use them like throw-away floppies because the disks are expensive and the drives aren't universal. You can't archive your extra files on them, because they're magnetically sensitive and CD-ROM's are better and cheaper. They don't have enough capacity for multimedia, etc., etc.
I use the ZIP with an rsync script to backup work in progress, that's about it. I did get that settlement letter and maybe I'll buy something and then immediately sell it on eBay.
Removeable media bigger than floppies? Have you heard of CD's..? They come in a few flavors: CD-ROM, CD-R, and CD-RW. All much faster, more reliable, and with much more storage than a Zip drive. Why is anybody even still using a Zip drive? It's ancient technology.
One working product does not a good product line make. Just because your worked doesn't mean that there were millions more that din't. There wouldn't have been a class action lawsuit if those problems didn't really exist.
I ONLY buy maxtor hard drives. I have never had one fail on me. The hard drives that i've bought before always failed, Seagate, Western Digital all of them. Maxtor NEVER. I still have a 40 MB Maxtor drive from 1990 that still works. I dont know you people are smoking.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
The settlement is probably negotiated on the premise that some folks actually get use out of their drives, before they die (or maybe they never die at all -- all of the 5 or so ZIP drives my company uses are still going strong). So, for some users the rebate is free money and for others it's less than their lost investment. That's how class actions work. They average everything across the board. The idea is that, while this isn't completely fair, the paperwork and court time necessary to do it right would suck up so much resources that even less would be available for the plaintiffs (and their lawyers).
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I bought a zip drive (actually my mommy bought it for my B-day) right after it came out and I suffered from this clicking.
A lot of people posted here that they never had these problems, but I'm sure they will take the rebates. I'm kinda (really; really) pissed that the dumb ass lawyers settled for rebates.
Oh wow, I can get more disks for this drive that sits on my desktop with no use. I've lost data because of this problem - the only way to rescue a disk which has been destroyed because of this problem is to format it!
Also in crappy windows (btw i haven't noticed one disk that's clicked in linux - but that's neither here nor there) while the clicking is going on it freezes the computer.
I love a 100 mb disk (which is useless now a days when you have a 20mb drive and a cdr[w] ) but this problem has rendered my drive worthless.
I guess I have to buy a new drive which I can't afford.
PLEASE REPLY IF YOU'VE HAD THESE PROBLEMS. Will the USB zip drive work with linux?
Get your Unix fortune now!
Maybe you could sell those rebates on e-bay -- so someone that really needs it could accumulate enough to replace their drive.
However the costs of Zip/Jaz/Any Removable versus fixed disks just got worse and worse over time, while CD-R just got better and better.
That's the result of standardization and competition. With Zip, Jaz, etc., once they sell you the drive, you're a captive market for the disks. With CD-R, anyone can make disks or drives, and the market price tends towards the cost of making them at the most efficient factory.
Try out the "Advanced Maxtor Data Recovery Method". Set the bad drive up as a primary on the second IDE interface. Install an OS on a "good" (well disposable) drive on the first interface. Hold the drive about 1.5" above a counter, hit the power. After the first drive spins up, and before the POST completes, wack the bad drive down onto the bench with authority, but not malice. I used this method to get data off of dozens of bad Maxtor drives (80Mbs - 1.5Gbs) back in the day. Ya got nothing to loose. Seems they had an issue with "sticktion". The r/w heads would stick to the surface of the platter. After you get the data off, you'll have a nice hockey puck.
Mommy. What's a karma whore?
The real kicker is that they in order to collect on the settlement, you have to buy more products which by a company who just admitted to have produced defective products!
Ok, they didn't admit it, they "settled" which could be construed as either admittal or not wanting to bother with it. Considering the massive number of people who were involved in the lawsuit (presumably) it's as good as admittal, in my book.
The only question that remains is how you collect. I know I don't have my receipts anymore, and I don't think I have the boxes the things came in. I got screwed out of two zip drives during this time period, one parallel and one scsi.
Ah well, that bit is my fault. It is a little lame that the company settles in a way that will ultimately bring them more business. Although it's also the fault of the lawyers handling the case, it sucks that the American judicial system allows this.
The problem is a combination of the lubricant used on the drive mechanism and the quality of metal the drive mechansim is made of. The lubricant builds up on the drive head and at points can come in contact with the disk meda. If shavings of metal from the drive mechanism get mixed into the lubricant, this causes the disk to become unreadable. If enough lubricant is allowed to fall onto the disk and it is then put in another drive the the drive head of the second drive can get lubricant on the read surface, and potentially pass it on to other disks. This is what makes the "click of death" seem contagious, it actually is.
The rebate, by the way, is $40 off the purchase of a zip 250 drive and 6 zip 250 disks. Some other usefull numbers are: 17.50 off a zip 250 drive OR 6 zip 250 disks and 12.50 off a zip 100 drive OR 6 zip 100 disks. There are also rebates on PocketZip drives and media. These items must be purchased from the Iomega Store or an Iomega Authorized Retailer.
My guess is that the lawyers who 'won' this case for the consumers did not accept rebate certificates as payment for their fees. I wonder how many millions they got while the rest of us get useless pieces of paper for more worthless products.
So who can I contact to tell them that this rebate proposal sucks? It may be a slight bit more favorable for those who have already had problems with their drives, but look at what the "settlement" offers me:
By definition, if I'm entitled to this rebate, I've already got a Zip drive. Why should I have to spend the money for a whole new drive to take advantage of the rebate? Same issue as above with the drives, and I've already got all the disks I need. Why can't I just get my rebate in cash? I'm not going to waste money buying more overpriced disks to take advantage of my rebate, either. And these options, too, would require me to spend money on more Iomega products to take advantage of this settlement. In order for me to take advantage of these offers, I must buy a product that Iomega profits off of.Ludicrousness aside, I have to admit that I'm very satisfied with my USB Zip drive. It's been very useful for my purposes, and I even purchased an Iomega CD-RW drive because of my satisfaction with the Zip drive and a nice low price. The only problem I've had is the AC Adaptor failing (and standard AC Adaptors don't fit), but after calling tech support I got it replaced in 5 days. I certainly don't deserve any of these rebates, because I have had no problems, but if I did deserve them, I'd be pretty pissed.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Doesn't anyone get it? This has nothing to do with Iomega's faulty zip drives, and everything to do with making some law firms money. they did it to Toshiba a year or so ago over some defective floppy drives. Stuff breaks all the time. The way to fix it is via warranty. This has nothing to do with that, and everything to do with class-action lawyers making fat fees.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but that's an extreme bit of overextrapolation. Getting your media ultra cheap isn't a very big factor if the media isn't big enough to hold the kind of data you're using.
Anyway, you've got the economics backwards. Floppies aren't ubiquitous because they're cheap. They're cheap because they're ubiquitous.
I an old IBM AT lying around somewhere. Still works pretty good, even though limited by a 16 Mhz processor, 512 K of RAM, and a 10-meg hard disk. Twenty years ago, when this system was first released, the 1 meg floppy was pretty impressive. Why, you could back up the whole system with only 10 disks. Throw in a 2400 modem, and you're ready to rock and roll!
The system I'm using right now has roughly 50 times more processing power, 400 times more RAM, and several thousand times more hard disk space. I was going to calculate the ration between a 1 megabit network connection and a 2400 baud modem, but you get the idea.
And of course the inevitable 1-meg floppy. Not even big enough to back up the registry. Too small, in fact, for anything really useful. It's just there out of industrial inertia.
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I use one of the first-generation zip drives that my brother purchased many years ago, and it still works flawlessly. He didn't realize he registered his product until he received a letter in the mail telling him about these rebates. He scoffed at the uselessness of a rebate off of zip drive stuff - because they're close to useless now.
Ironically, my brother was also the recipient of a much nicer settlement from Toshiba for their floppy drives - and his never had a problem =). They actually gave real credit at their store, a few hundred dollars or something, enough to help buy his wireless network card.
Congrats to the plaintiffs - you've managed to get every Zip drive owner a completely useless rebate offer!
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I don't know why Iomega is still in business. The capacity of Zip drives has been overtaken by flash rom. Zip only offers a significant cost saving if you have lots of the disks but is much bulkier and pretty shodily made.
The Jaz drive was obsolete pretty soon after I got it. The cost of IDE drives is now $200 for 60Gb. I have no interest at all in a Jaz drive offering a measly 2Gb at a cost of $100+ per cartridge. In fact I have little interest in a Jaz drive if the cartridges are free.
Iomega is a classic overhyped dotcom stock. IOM rocketed upwards on the assumption that everyone would be forced to buy them.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I bought my zip drive within a few weeks of its initial release, and I have YET to have a problem. Compared to today's standards: A bit slow? Yeah. Defective? Hardly.
Want to talk defective? I've got a stack of Maxtor hard drives...
First you have to go to http://www.iomega.com/rinaldi/request_rebate.html and request the rebate. The terms aren't even very good (see below) plus you have to wait until the end of October just to get the rebate! I don't even use my zip anymore since it clicks constantly and loses data.
,as a member of the settlement class who has provided a Proof of Manifestation, you are entitled to your choice of one of the following rebates:
Rinaldi Class Action Settlement
Michael+McCune
$17.50 toward the purchase of a Zip® 250 Drive; or
$12.50 toward the purchase of a Zip® 100 Drive; or
$40.00 toward the purchase of a Zip® 250 Drive and a 6-pack of Zip® 250 disks; or
$27.50 toward the purchase of a Zip® 100 Drive and a 6-pack of Zip® 100 disks; or
$17.50 toward the purchase of six Zip® 250 disks; or
$12.50 toward the purchase of six Zip® 100 disks; or
$12.50 toward the purchase of a Pocket Zip® - PC Drive; or
$35.00 toward the purchase of a Pocket Zip® - PC Drive and a 10 pack of Pocket Zip® media; or
$22.50 toward the purchase of a Pocket Zip® - PC Drive and a 4 pack of Pocket Zip® media.
If the Court approves the settlement, these rebates will be available for the purchase of one of these products from Iomega's on-line store, www.iomegadirect.com, or through the use of a mail-in rebate form. As explained in the Settlement Notice, the rebates only become effective after the Court approves the settlement. We currently anticipate that the settlement will become effective shortly after the settlement hearing, which the Court has scheduled for June 8, 2001. As described in the Settlement Notice, Iomega is required to make the rebates available within 120 days following the settlement effective date, but no earlier than October 31, 2001.
To take advantage of the rebates once they are available, we encourage you to take the following steps:
1. Print out this page for your records.
2. Return to the URL listed below on or about October 31, 2001 to determine if the settlement has been approved and, if so, to receive information on how to take advantage of the rebates through iomegadirect.com or through the mail-in program.
http://www.iomega.com/rinaldi/approve_y.html
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[iomega]
Copyright © 2000
Iomega Corporation
All rights reserved
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
A few years ago I was doing phone tech support for Dell. We used to have to replace drives because of this problem all the time.
One day I got a call from a customer that happened to be calling from Iomega. "Yeah, when I put a disk in my zip drive it goes click, click, click."
Thankfully, I made it to the mute button. That was easily the second funniest call I ever took at Dell.
-Peter
Iomega's real mistake was trying to pretend that nothing was wrong. I suppose they were afraid of driving the stock price down or something. But if they had done a simple "we blew it" announcement and offered their users a simple diagnostic download (like Steve Gibson's TIP), they would have come out ahead of the game.
They do deserve points for ignoring expired warantees for CoD drives. But they didn't get these points, because they didn't publicize the policy for fear of publicizing the problem. Nor did they try to educate people on the technical issues (like why a non-defective drive can click when trying to read a defective disk). So they got bad press, rumors of a "contagious" bug, and a lawsuit.
Which is too bad. From the start, the Zip was obviously an attempt to replace the ubiguitous and useless HD floppy. I always hoped that attempt would succeed.
__
http://www.iomega.com/rinaldi/request_rebate.html
See also http://www.iomega.com/rinaldi/faqs.html and http://www.iomega.com/rinaldi/index.html