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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 $40 for various Iomega products. The settlement comes out of a lawsuit filed in Delaware in 1998 that claimed that Zip drives had a manufacturing flaw that often caused the drives and disks to fail. (Read an April 1998 Computer Link Magazine article about the 'Click of Death' deficiency.) My question: Where do I go to get my rebate?" Does being allowed to settle such a suit with rebates worth less than the cost of a zipdrive strike anyone as a little odd? (Maybe the cigarette companies should have tried this tactic.)
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$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...
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When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
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.
If you're going to prosecute everybody who knew smoking was harmful, you'll have a few million posthumous suicide convictions to hand out, too.
-
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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
(hey, they figure we were dumb enough to buy their products the first time...)
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There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Ohhh, good idea... get your pound of flesh, eh?
Only problem I see is that you have to buy direct from them and they seem to overcharge by about 20%-50% compared to, say egghead or something.
Quick check, $105 for a SCSI* at egghead, $150 at iomega
bleh, not even worth it just to make them follow through with honoring the settlement. I'd say they are walking out of this one with a slap on the wrist. Then again, this is their proposed settlement, do we have to accept this proposal? Do the lawyers representing the class still have to approve this or can they/will they still pursue the litigation?
*item 10933
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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 letter says:
Still not much of a choice; you can buy direct and have the rebate instantly deducted from a price that is inflated above the rebate amount compared to other online stores, or you can buy at somewhere like CompUSA and mail in the rebate.
I still think it sucks. Now I have to go shop around for a lower price _and_ have to wait 4-8 weeks for the rebate check to come in the mail? They may as well have sent a one line letter saying 'Ha Ha, you are f*cked!' for all the good this settlement does me.
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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
__
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.
I haven't received my letter yet (and my Zip drive was working just fine last time I hooked it up, about 3 months ago...), but from other postings here it sounds like you have a choice of whether to use the rebate directly at Iomega's on-line store, or to buy somewhere else and mail it in. The rebates seem to be less than the overcharges at Iomega's on-line store versus other sellers, so if you can't use it at other sellers the offer is just plain fraudulent!
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.
__
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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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.
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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