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.)

Comments

Lawsuits, rebates and such

[Sancho]

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.

Re:Lawsuits, rebates and such

[Fishstick]

The letter I got has a 'proof of claim' section that asks for name, address, date of purchase, serial number and email, and then there is a 'proof of manifestation' section that asks a few questions:

1) Have you experienced a CONTINUAL clicking noise when attempting to use your Zip drive?

2) Does the drive make continual clicking noise regardless of which Zip disk is inserted?

3) Has your drive failed to read and write data after making a continual clicking noise?

...then at the bottom you get to sign in blood:

I,__________ [please print your name], attest and represent, under the pains and penalties of perjury, that the answers provided herein are true and correct.

Signature:___________

Then you can have them mail you a rebate form:

lowest is $5 for six Zip 100 disks and the highest is $40 toward the purchase of a Zip 250 and 6-pack of 250 disks.

um.... no thanks.

---

Re:I would rather get a patch that solves the bug

[inio]

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.

You call this a settlement?

[Rocketboy]

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.

Rebates?!?

[SMN]

[Moderators: This is a rant, not a troll or flamebait. Please rate accordingly.]

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:

Scott Noveck, as a member of the settlement class, you are entitled to your choice of one of the following rebates:

$10.00 toward the purchase of a Zip® 250 Drive; or
$5.00 toward the purchase of a Zip® 100 Drive;

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?

or $25.00 toward the purchase of a Zip® 250 Drive and a 6-pack of Zip® 250 disks; or
$12.50 toward the purchase of a Zip® 100 Drive and a 6-pack of Zip® 100 disks; or
$10.00 toward the purchase of six Zip® 250 disks; or
$5.00 toward the purchase of six Zip® 100 disks;

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.

or $5.00 toward the purchase of a Pocket Zip® - PC Drive; or
$17.50 toward the purchase of a Pocket Zip® - PC Drive and a 10 pack of Pocket Zip® media; or
$10.00 toward the purchase of a Pocket Zip® - PC Drive and a 4 pack of Pocket Zip® media.

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.

Lawyers

[boxless]

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.

Re:The Evil Suits Strike Again

[fm6]

And of course, absolutely every other user in the world has precisely your needs. Not to mention your prime role as an industry decision maker.

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.

__

Some old Zip drives are quite reliable

[proxima]

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!

My Jaz died pretty quickly

[Zeinfeld]

I had a Jaz drive, damn thing broke after a few months of not very intensive use.

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.

Never had a problem with my old zip

[BIGJIMSLATE]

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...

Re:Good ol' iomega.

[Sethb]

Honestly, that's what you get for buying a drive that transfers data through your printer port. 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.

Back in '97, I bought the external Zip Plus. It lets me use SCSI on my box here at home, and if I needed to, I could hook it up via parallel to a box I was working on. Fortunately, I didn't have to do that very often...
---

Re:so object

[pod]

I think the lawyers' cut (what is it these days? 30%?) should consist of Iomega discount coupons, seeing as they fought so hard to win them for their clients...

The terms are pretty lame.

[Mike McCune]

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.

Rinaldi Class Action Settlement

Michael+McCune ,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:

$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

CoD doesn't exist, can we have a drive?

[pete-classic]

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

The Evil Suits Strike Again

[fm6]

OK, letting the quality of your product slip is not good. But if Iomega had just shipped a few bad drives, that would not be such a big deal. Even the best hardware breaks, and no sane consumer assumes otherwise.

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.

__

Get your Rebate here:

[table and chair]

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