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Iomega Ships 35GB 'Son of Jaz'
Hamster Of Death writes "Iomega has begun selling its 'son of Jaz' removable hard drive, Rev. Pitched as an alternative to tape back-up rigs, Rev provides 35GB of uncompressed storage capacity per 2.5in removable disk. The disk is mounted inside a 1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm cartridge, and yields a 25MBps transfer rate - eight times faster than DDS-4 tape, Iomega claims."
it'll be a cold day in hell before you see me buying an Iomega product again
Can you attach it and mount it.
I could buy 3 large external hard drives or more for the money. Any of the hard drives from Maxtor, WD etc. are less costly than the media alone.
I like that Iomega is finally realizing where their market share is. They can't compete with CD's and DVD's but a new tape alternative sounds interesting.
vampirical
The problem with Iomega is usually the price of their devices/media. Not mentionning the lack of interoperability and the proprietary aspect of it...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Did you hear something?...
It made some revving sounds. But that wasn't a good thing.
60$ a disk isn't worth it imo
Whose Jaz then?
"Iomega Rev disks are engineered to provide an extremely durable and reliable shelf life, estimated to exceed 30 years," it added.
Of course, it makes the disk more expensive than might otherwise be the case. Iomega said it will charge $60 a disk (or four for $200) - $10 more than it said it would when it announced Rev last November."Iomega Rev disks are engineered to provide an extremely durable and reliable shelf life, estimated to exceed 30 years," it added.
Of course, it makes the disk more expensive than might otherwise be the case. Iomega said it will charge $60 a disk (or four for $200) - $10 more than it said it would when it announced Rev last November.
LoL!
yueahas! tirado!
Click of death.
http://www.kontentdesign.com/
I don't know about everyone else, but my experience has been that Iomega magnetic disk drives and media are unreliable. I wouldn't trust my data to this even if it was 100GB/cart.
Wait, it's a 2.5" disk, enclosed in what size? 1x 0.8 x 0.8cm?
From the article: "Iomega Rev disks are engineered to provide an extremely durable and reliable shelf life, estimated to exceed 30 years," it [the company] added.
Not trying to start a flamewar - I'd really like to see how they were able to get such high reliability, and how they got to the "30 year" number. If it's true that's unprecedented reliability. (Or is it just the shelf life of the material?)
I'm a 2000 man.
10x8x8cm...
1x.8x.8 cm would be a recipie for lost backups.
It seems like a new storage standard comes out every week, unless something sets this apart from zip drives, usb flash hd's, mem sticks, a billion other things, I don't see it gaining much market share. Something will come out in the next six months to eclipse this, well before it gains substantial market share.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Not very practical if you ask me...something better would be an external high capacity firewaire/USB 2 hard drive...cheaper and better if you ask me
10x8x8cm != 1x0.8x0.8cm
The article lists the cartridge size as 10cm x 8cm x 8cm. That'd be one of those littls shuttle PCs.
.8cm x .8cm. That'd be about the size of a wristwatch.
.8cm
The blurb above lists it as 1cm x
So, how big is this thing? My guess is 10cm x 8cm x
one very important part of info they left out was the cost of disks... if it's $380 for external and $400 for internal drives, how much is each disk? remember when the jaz drives were $100 each? i rarely saw them. Now this comes out, with (i suspect) a similar (or higher) price, i wonder how useful this will be.
I'd rather carry around a external hard drive.
Runnin' On Empty
wasn't there an Orb drive that was basically a removable HD that had the heads contained in the media? I remember seeing one demonstrated showing how you could bring your own computer with you where ever you went. All you had to do was boot off the drive. The ORB if I remember right was only like 2.2 gigs. I think we may be getting a few of these new drives. It sure beats burning a few DVD's to do backups.
There's no Mac or Linux support - Iomega (at one point in time) was HUGE in the Mac Owner's hardware regime (especially at ad agencies)
Since "the click of death fiasco" and the fact that Zip carts never really decreased in price, a lot of Mac users switched to CDRs.
Why doesn't Iomega get the fact that CD drives = everyone has them - Rev drives - NO ONE HAS THEM?
This is like Gateway - Gateway SEEMS to have thought people actually WANTED their flavor of PC - Iomega seems to think people WANT their proprietary standard!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
For the price and for the facillity. :-(
4gig @ 2$ (40gig for 20$) and it can be read almost every where !
35gig on a 20$ with a dedicated propritary drive
Not for me !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
I just wonder if these things will be as shoddy as Jaz drives were? At my work we used to use Jaz drives to make images of machines onto, which we would then burn to CD. The problem is, after about a month's use the cardtridges would start failing. Granted we probably used them a lot more than most places would, given that we would fill them up, and then erase them at least once a day; however, its was still a very expensive way to make images. In the end we ditched the removable media and set up a network to do our imaging over, which has saved us a ton of money, and countless man-hours of screwing with failing cardtridges. I wonder if the new cardtridges will be any better?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
that summary was barely understandable. I almost had to read the article.
Would you trust 35GB of your data, porn even, to Iomega? They dropped the ball long ago.
...is more like it...
Slashdot states :
:
"The disk is mounted inside a 1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm cartridge."
The article says
"The disk is mounted inside a 10 x 8 x 8cm cartridge."
Somehow i'd rather believe The Reg.
You can't fool me, Mr. Click!
in todays content based world is 35GB enough. I work for a mid sized architecture firm. our back up typically is 60 GB every day on DLT tapes. A DLT tape costs in the range of $40 where as an 40/80 DLT drive is around $600. So I dont really see this being a viable alternative to the existing technology. The other question I have is how well does the disk hold up to abuse. aren't most drive based solutions pretty tempermental when it comes to shock damage ?
Check out EE Times article on the drive. Of course, you could always get a 60GB drive for less ($47 shipped) from pricewatch, but if Iomega can ramp this up quicker, it'll get price-competitive again.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
The second story down is somewhat on-topic . . .
Tech support tales.
-Peter
...17.5GB (with 2:1 compression)?!?! It's not removable media unless its measured with unrealistic compression ratios.
IEE Spectrum in January had an article about this coming - I'm a little behind in magazine reading. Looks like it could be awesome for moving my server backups off server without making my bandwidth charges skyrocket.
Unfortunately, the SCSI version isn't out yet - expected sometime this quarter I understand. The USB 2.0 and ATAPI versions won't work with my servers though. I only hope that typical SCSI removeable media drivers in Linux will work with it - they say Linux support won't be ready until the second half of 2004, but who knows what that means...
Anyway, I'm hopeful for one of these... There is definitely a need for backup media that is larger than a DVD in the small business world and probably the home markets as well.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
I've been searching for a backup solution like this. I read about this earlier today and immediately thought, "Woah. This will solve my backup problem." Then I looked at the price and realized I could get a USB 2.0 or firewire hard drive for a LOT less money and have a LOT more storage.
If it's compatible Linux, I'll certainly reconsider when/if the price comes down.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
From jaz, to zip, to orb, to sparq, none of these solutions stood the test of time. Maybe the new approach to sealing all the works may change the dismal history of reliability. But I'll leave you to prove the reliability. For me, I've resigned myself to doubling up on hard drives, and imaging to the secondary drive. I long for a removable solution, but not that much these days.
when removable hard drives are so cheap, and enterprise systems are already invested in tape drives, I see no market niche for this.
Plus, 35 gig disks at $60 a pop?
mom and dad aren't going to want to pay $180, plus $400 drive cost, to back up their 120gb hard drive they got in their computer.
good luck iomega.
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
Their web site erroneously states that the drive has "rugged 35GB disks that can store up to 90GB** of compressed data". Sorry, Charlie, but a 35GB disk can only hold 35GB of compressed data. Perhaps it can hold 90GB of data, compressed but unless they've managed to break the laws of physics, no 35GB drive can hold more than 35GB of compressed data. Clueless marketing folk strike again. ;-)
With the internal ATAPI drive as a bootable partition, it seems you could get very good security by keeping everything ( OS, swap area, et. al. ) on removable media. Lock up disk in safe when not in use, so even malicious access to hardware becomes more difficult.
A Human Right
Well, if it is truly the "son of Jaz," then it looks like is should probably run under Linux.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
We should just invest large amounts of money in 2.88MB floppys. It'll work trust me, cost? who cares about cost!?
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
We had some very bad experiences with the original JAZ drives. After alot of use the disk and/or drive would malfunction (make a loud noise) and both would be rendered useless. The more interesting part was that if you took that disk that was damaged and put it into a brand new drive it would proceed to hose that drive as well.
Looks interesting, but I've had bad enough luck with IOMega products I wouldn't consider buying another one. But this article brings up an important point. How do you back up your data?
At work I've got a DDS4 6 tape autochanger but I'm maxing it out and the tapes tend to die easily. The insanely cheap prices of hard disks have allowed us to expand to a hefty amount of storage even though we are a small business. It will only be a matter of time before the autochanger doesn't cut it anymore. So when you are a small business, how do you back up a lot of data without paying enterprise prices?
-R
What? Iomega is still in business? I like the idea of an alternative to tape, but I just can't get past how unreliable Iomega's products have been in the past. That click of death thing really clinched it for me. If we didn't still have so much on Zip disks yet to be archived, I'd never touch another Iomega product again.
Now in all fairness, perhaps they've gotten past the problems at last. Still, they'll have to prove it to a skeptical public.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
As for reliablility, we have an accounting system for which we still do a daily backup on 6 Zip discs (one per day). It works, why change it? After 6 years the original disks are still running, though the original SCSI ZIP has been replaced with USB. That original SCSI zip is still in use elsewhere for non-critical backup. I think that counts as a long term test.
My perception of Iomega drives is that a lot of people don't need them, but for some of us there is just no other solution that is near as good.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Sorry, 1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm? That makes no sense whatsoever. A bit smaller, and almost the same shape, as a sugar cube?
Even at the Register, they say it's 10 x 8 x 8cm, which puts it at a very large cube. I realized that they probably meant 0.8cm instead of 8, but then their numbers would be 10 x 0.8 x 0.8cm, a long rod.
The number is most likely 10 x 10 x 0.8cm.
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" - Vroomfondel, H2G2
Because fitting a 2.5in disk inside a 1cm cartridge has to involve some sort of space folding technology...
I'm assuming the poster misplaced some decimal points on the cartridge size...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
AIT:
Tapes - $50 for 25GB (uncompr) = $2.00/GB
Drives - > $1000
Speed - 12MB/s (uncompr)
Rev:
Media - $60 for 35GB (uncompr) = $1.70/GB
Drives - $400 (external)
Speed - 25MB/s (uncompr)
So, for $.30/GB plus >$600 initial investment saved you pay the price of basically no interchange compatibility (nobody else has one yet).
Seems like it actually might make sense. I know we struggled with increasing backup demands a lot where I used to work (web host/ISP). Tape was killing us, so we switched to hot-swap disk drives. At 10x8x.8 cm this sure save me some shelf space in my backup vault.
I really think one would have to be insane to trust an Iomega product with 35GB worth of data. I've had a Zip drive die on me from the infamous "click of death" losing 250MB worth of data in the process, and that was pretty disappointing.
Now compare this to losing an $400 dollar drive along with an $60 disc full of 35GB worth of data, which could potentially be expected from this product if one were to pay attention to Iomega's history. I'd probably end up going on a rampage.
With a pen drive, you don't need a driver, don't need cables and just connect it to anything running Windows 98 or above with a USB port. (not sure about Linux or Apple). I have a 64mb one I use everywhere all the time, at work, home, at Kinkos. It is the best storage medium I've ever used.
The price to get really decent storage is still too high, but drops exponentially every couple of months.
Even if Iomega sells these drives (they might), there's no way they can compete with the Chinese companies which don't have the huge infrastructure, thousands of employees, marketing costs, etc.
I am wondering if they have something in mind for placing them in a silo or other library-type arrangement as a replacement for datacenter level backup systems. Even at these prices, it might be a viable alternative to tape, when taking into account shelf-life and size. Of course, it would probably help to RTFA before asking these questions. But this is Slashdot...
What?
What is that big "sideways capital I" shaped bulge on the top of the unit? Some sort of sound damping layer so you can't hear any clicks?
Not that Iomega are anymore a VERY big name to reckon with, this product is not at all worth it.Everyone would rather go for cheaper 24GB tape drives or other alternative.
Its just not worth paying for and besides Iomega have only dropped in quality if anything else.
Lord of the Binges.
If "Son of Jaz" is pitched as a backup media, why wouldn't you go with a blue laser dvd? Media costs will surely be lower.
The more relevant factor than the cost of the device itself is probably the cost of the backup media. I know up until recently tape was the most cost effective media for data backup. If the the Son of Jaz disks are cheaper per megabyte and are just as reliable then I would consider buying one of those.
Who needs to store stuff on a dinky 35 GB Jaz drive when you can use a seperate hard drive or cheap storage server with inexpensive 300 GB drives readily available! When you factor in software RAID, it's just ridiculous to imaging flipping in and out 35 GB disks. Iomega should just give up in the storage arena.
Communism was just a red herring.
I hope either Iomega, or another company will take this idea and make them into a solution that can be changed mechanically. Tape changers today still suck, and are super expensive.
I'd like to see something like the mini harddrives ipod and other devices use turned into a tape replacement solution. Imagine a cartridge of these that simple sides forwards and backwards, and a "head" that is really an miniture Serial IDE interface that plugs into the drive, powers it up, and then writes or reads.
Take it one step further and stripe these. Write in duplicate to three of these suckers. If one fails you've got two backups. When you read you get much faster results. Even further, create a brick of them, and you don't even need a movable head/interface.
In a few years these little drives should reach 100's of gigs. The day of tapes should be coming to an end...I always think of one of those old movies with the reals spinning in the background.
After six Zip drives, and more than 50 zip disks destroyed by the "Click of Death", excuse me for not trusting Iomega with my data anymore.
What really got me, was the complete disregard Iomega showed to its custumers with the Click of Death incident.
I saw several thousands of dollars worth of Iomega hardware/disks turn to crap thanks to that clicky sound, and that is without counting the data itself or the time spent dealing with recovering said data.
Sorry Iomega, you are not a trusted brand in storage media anymore.
adl
My boring ramblings
It wasn't just how bad the product turned out to be - it was Iomega's failure to support the product. Double Plus Ungood.
For instance:
* reintroduce the Disc2@ CD burn labelling that was in Yamaha Drives
* find a way like Plextor has to burn even MORE data to standard CDRs
* increase DVD-/+R writing speeds with blue lasers & be the fi1st to market & make deals w/ companies like Apple
* design CD burners that label & burn all in 1 drive - small dye sub printers COULD EASILY FIT in a 5.25" drive bay
* sell integrated media readers into CDRW/DVDR drives or what about w/ front facing firewire and USB ports
* reintroduce the Nakamichi jukebox 5.25" 5 disc drive!
* Something
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Iomega's Jaz cartridges were undependable, so why the hell would you dump 35GB on its older brother? Can't count the number of times a student brought in a Jaz disk and it was busted in some manner...
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
+5 flamebait should be left as it is.
They list it as a 35/90GB drive. The fine print says the 90 assumes 2.6:1 compression, which is certainly a bit unreasonable. Heck, most tape drive companies are happy they can get away with advertising 2:1 compression, since reality is often only 1.5:1. I note that they also define 1GB to be 1e9 bytes, though I've given up that argument in favor of GiB.
Fucking awesome
I have a cusomer that purchased a case of 200MB ATA hard drives instead of using tape. Incremental and transaction backups are mirrored.
Interesting solution, seems you'd want something more permenant for archival backups though.
-- $G
Iomega says :: The disk is mounted inside a 10 x 8 x 8cm cartridge
Privacy is terrorism.
I wasn't a victim of the "click of death" drives, but I did buy a CDRW drive with their name on it. The drive had problems from day one and "technical support: would never acknowledge them. I only found out much later that the drive was a repackaged drive from another manufacturer, and that manufacturer had firmware updates out for a long time that fixed their version of the drive (but would not apply to the drive that identified itself as an Iomega drive). Iomega would never bother to supply a firmware update for the version they released or even acknowledge the problem.
In addition to this and tons of other horror stories of support issues, a problem I see with Iomega products is that the media is never cost effective. You could likely buy hard drives with more capacity than you could but just media for this new Iomega junk. And you could buy an IDE removable drive tray for a heck of a lot less than you can buy this drive for, even with several extra trays. If you go with the hard drive tray approach, hard drives for it will keep coming down in price and offer greater capacity; if you go with the Iomega solution the capacity will never increase over the 35 gigs and media will never come down in price.
Sure, there are some people (I even know a couple) who are dumb enough to put a zip drive in a computer that already has a CDRW drive in it and feed the zip drive. But there is simply no good reason to buy this or many other overpriced, underperforming Iomega products.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Ooops, there goes my data. :)
oh well, I will wait. I learned the HARD WAY with the zip disk...
to me, this is just a rehash
That's failures versus time. Initially you have a high failure rate due to defects, then a long floor with few failures, then a ramping failure rate due to the product wearing out.
MTBF measures the rate of failures during the long floor period, and ignores initial defect failures and things wearing out. So you just get a bunch of good products running, wait until a few of them fail, then calculate the MTBF as ((amount of time) * (number of units running in parallel) / (number of failures)). 35 years is about 300,000 hours, or roughly equivalent to running 2,000 devices for a week and experiencing one failure.
That's also why MTBF is a shitty way of determining lifespan; most devices wear out way before the are expected to fail according to MTBF.
---
Find out more about the impending downfall o
If you agree with any of this, feel free to repost it in the future.
* If "Linux" just refers to the kernel and not the operating system, how can "FreeBSD" refer to the operating system (userland tools, standard libraries, etc.) and not just the kernel? Face it, "GNU/Linux" looks and sounds ridiculous.
* If you expect companies to follow the copyright of the GPL, you should support the RIAA going after infringers of its copyright. If not, you're a hypocrite.
* There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company being upset that its product is being pirated freely over online networks. Try getting a real job sometime and see what it feels like when your work is everywhere, and you start worrying that your days are numbered. Does John Carmack want you to "sample" his new game via the "free advertising" happening on eMule?
* OSDN-owned Slashdot thinks its niche opinion represents the majority of the world. This is a result of people visiting every day and buying into the groupthink. Nobody outside of Slashdot knows or cares about "Linux," "RIAA", "M$," or anything else Slashdotters think is such a huge issue in today's society. Go to a mall or coffee shop sometime and see what people actually talk about.
* Speaking of OSDN--it's a Linux company...that owns a "tech news" site...that posts news stories negative toward competitors like Microsoft. If a Windows company or even Microsoft itself owned a "tech news" site and posted anti-Linux articles all the time, everyone would be up in arms. But with OSDN, it's a-okay.
* Slashbots think people don't like the music coming out these days, which is the cause of the piracy. Never mind that if people didn't like the music they wouldn't be pirating it, most Slashbots--again, this goes back to the niche opinion thing--don't realize that most people these days love the music coming out and want to hear all of it. Probing around, you discover that Slashdot is made up of nerds and fogies who listen to things like The Who and Blind Guardian and techno--not what mainstream society enjoys.
* Any company ending in "AA" is evil. Especially if it doesn't want you distributing its works without paying for it. Somehow, this mindset is supposed to make sense.
* The inevitable result of all this is a world in which nothing can be profitable because people simply pirate free copies. Is that really what Slashbots want? OSS and free-ness in general reminds me of the hippie era of the 60s--idealistic socialism that only exists because of the surrounding capitalism around it that provides the environment for it to exist. We all know what happened to that idea.
* Slashdot editors are abusive. We all remember The Post. It's amusing the editors never mention the issue. The worst editor is michael, who will mod you down, insult you for your post count, and post unprofessional color commentary along with the article. This is the same bizarre person who cybersquatted Censorware for years--even as Slashdot posted articles negative toward cybersquatting! Michael played it off like he was some sort of stalking victim, which made it all the more bizarre.
* The moderation system is broken. If you mod someone as "Overrated," you can't be metamodded. People abuse this all the time to gang up and knock you down into oblivion.
* Somehow, user-ran executables are always a "New Microsoft Hole" (actual article headline). Meanwhile, LinuxSecurity posts weekly security advisories for all the Linux distributions. You never, ever, EVER see any of these mentioned on Slashdot--bizarre things like arbitrary code execution via MPlayer.
* Microsoft is supposed to be some sort of non-innovative rip-off artist. Meanwhile, the same people posting those comments do it through KDE with taskbars, sidepanels, start menus, similar print dialogs, and an integrated web/filesystem browser. Effectively ripping people off then criticizing those who came up with the ideas in the first place.
* Linux is "ready for the desktop." This is the year
We are created, and then delivered by storks in a basket.
However, storks reproduce in a less savoury manner. All the male storks gather around the female, and have a huge bukkake. Some of the jazz ends up dribbling into the female stork's 'love-nest', and fertilises the egg like the Eurotunnel Boring Machine drilling into the English channel. Then out pops the egg, and then out pops the baby stork, releasing a whole new ball of joy into this world.
Awwwww (or should we say Ewwwww?)
about 35gb of data on a CDR? ...
Yea, that's why they're not in direct competition, because they are targetted at different markets. CDRs aren't a serious backup technology for companies.
In terms of backups and dead storage, it's nice to see something that's not a tape drive. Tapes are expensive and very linear -- restoring anything from tape sucks ass. You have to unspool and respool the entire thing to get at the data.
It doesn't matter if people WANT their proprietary standard, because PEOPLE aren't the target audience.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
... lies in fitting a "2.5in removable disk" in a "1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm cartridge".
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I bought into Bernoulli drives when they hit the IDE bus... Win 95 came out and they dropped support for all IDE Bernoulli products. Shortly thereafter, they dropped Bernoulli products entirely.
I serviced many, many ZIP drives around the "click o death" period.
I serviced several of my customers with JAZ drives and found out that, although the disks are removable, when the drives died, you couldn't get another JAZ drive and expect to read the media!
Yeah, I'm gonna hop right on this!
Are you sure there is, and will be, no Linux support? I realize the link is not disposative. However, it indicates there may be Linux support that either hasn't been set forth in the web page yet, or is in progress.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
A pen is 12cm long. Shuttle PCs are 30-40cm long.
A wrist watch is 5 x 5 x 2cm. A totally different size scale.
10x8x.8 is closer to an old GB cartrige that's a bit wider and longer than normal.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Fitting a 2.5 in disk into a "1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm cartridge."
Consequences ensue.
Iomega's business is a corpse they just havent caught onto the fact their ONLY claim to fame is still the aging zip100 its not just the universities that bought into it but the government too during my time in the navy they used them zip100s religiously and were CONSTATLY replacing installing new drives once the slow moving line of revenue swaps out (government and educational) to the next latest and greatest.... iomega is fucked. the zip,jazz still IS the revenue stream
I bulk buy my blank CDs and DVDs by the hundred. I've just re-stocked. The way I see it, this is enough blank media to last me untill I die (or untill CDs / DVDs become obsolete, whichever is the soonest). I cannot imagine what anybody would do with these 35Gb carts, when they cost so much more than any other kind of media I know.
It's a Miracle!!!
Okay, expensive, and no one needs this stuff anymore. Why do they bother? $60/disk? $400 for the unit? I don't understand where and why there was funding.
The first post in this thread, though modded as flame-bait, is exactly how the majority of previous Iomega purchasers feel.
The Zip Drive was a nice... novelty. I never purchased one as I thought the media was too slow and too overpriced. It was also introduced just as CD burners were becoming mainstream, and there's no doubt who won that war. A CD golds 6-7 times more data than a zip disk, is drastically cheaper than the aforementioned zip disk, and every computer can use the media (unlike said zip disk)!
No... The zip drive never got my money. I was instead suckered into the whole Jaz drive debacle.
Without reiterating what all of us suckers now know, the Jaz drive was the biggest most over-priced piece of shit ever!
And that in itself might have been ok had Iomega came forward, stepped up to the plate and said "We had some quality control issues. We've corrected these, and have trashed all the affected units. In addition, those who have purchased said drives can now exchange them at their nearest retailer for an updated version at no cost".
They had such an opportunity to make a great customer servicing impression on all of us poor mistreated buyers, but they didn't. Instead they offered rude customer service reps who prefered to blame the user for the problems as opposed to admitting to them themselves.
Then they offered solutions that didn't fix anything, and cost the user more money - "Well... You can send the unit back to us at your cost, and we'll look at it. If we find anything wrong, we'll replace it with a remanufactured unit" (That will likely also have the same "click of death" problem you're currently experiencing).
Does anyone remember the eventual outcome of this? All of us who got suckered into the Jaz drive were eventually allowed to return our damaged goods for credit towards another Iomega purchase.
That was their answer after a couple of years of harrasment and threatened law suits.
So no Iomega, I'm not interested in another of your products, no matter how good it sounds.
And isn't it interesting how the 'Son of Jaz' comes out just as dual sided DVD's and such as now coming into the consumer arena!
It'll be almost an instant replay of the CD/Original Jaz drive fight, and I'll bet money on the fact that in a few years or so, you'll have an entirely new generation of people complaining about Iomegas quality and customer service. Not to mention whining about how they wish they'd have waitied for the higher density DVD burners to become more mainstream.
Iomega is forever synonymous(SP?) with "Bad" and "Waste of money" in my book now. And you?
It's been reported in the OEM market that Iomega has not only replaced, but upgraded the famous Zip Click-Of-Death(TM?) for their new Son of Jaz model. It seems that when my SoJ disks start to fail, the device will begin playing soulful tunes from the always enjoyable John Coltrane.
Iomega may not understand market pricing, quality assurance or customer service. It's good to know that they have figured out something that their customers have known for a while now - when you lose data, soothing music helps ease the pain!
Well, these days anyway. If you're using a 35-40Gb tape you're using *old* technology.
Current tape drives are:
200Gb (400gb compressed) 35MB/s (70MB/s) LTO 2.
300Gb (900Gb compressed) 40MB/s (120MB/s) IBM 3592.
300gb (600Gb compressed) 36MB/s (72MB/s) SDLT.
500Gb (1.3Tb compressed) 30MB/s (78MB/s) SuperAIT.
If you're backing systems up, tape begins making economic sense when your backups start getting past 100Gb or so. Below that level you might as well use removable hard disks + hotplug bay.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
But really, 35 gigs isn't enough to bother with. Even if the drives do work, at face it, this is Iomega we're talking about so probably not, it'll be obsoleted by whatever formated wins out in the HD DVD contest so who cares.
Anybody who buys into this is a fool and deserves to be taken.
Anyone remember their video capture gizmo, the Iomega Buz?
I bought one about 2 months before they totally scrapped that pile of junk, with absolutely no driver updates/support whatsoever.
Oh, yeah, I also had to send every Zip drive our company ever purchased to an early grave. The Jaz was the only thing they ever made that I actually got really solid use out of.
Buyer beware.
"Follow your Bliss." -- Joseph Campbell
Click of death is freaking contagious you dipshits! It's a virus written by some russian guy.
reading through iomega's site, it seems that the class action lawsuit about the Click of Death came to a conclusion. It covers items purchased between 1995 and 2001.
Do recent Zip drives still exhibit this behavior? I just bought the USB version last week, and havn't used it yet. Now i'm wondering if i should just return it immediately.
Does anyone have any recent information?
I think the articale should read
"Iomega ships new 35Kills Son of Sam"
great... now they are selling mass murder (via loud clicking sounds)
Sorry, I call bullshit. Long distance from Canada to the US did not cost 66 cents a minute in the time frame you're talking about, the mid-nineties. Or if it did, you're a total fucking idiot for not switching LD carriers.
Firewire and/or USB2.0 external hard drives are the way to go. Shop smart enough and you can get a hard drive for $0.30/GB (sometimes less) and an external case for $50.
Fast, fully hot swappable between almost any machine at any time without drivers (for win2k and xp) as opposed to swappable between machines with Rev drives.
On a side note, tape sucks. Video, audio, data - all of it. You like tape drives up until yours fails, gets replaced, and you realize that six months worth of archive tapes wont read in a non-failing/mis-aligned drive.
Who is 'Reverand Pitched'?
Why does Iomega have a reverand for a spokesman?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
A little too late and a little too expensive.
What's the target market for this? Home users?
DVD writers go for less than $100 now, and DVD-Rs are $1/disk, RW's are may be $1.80. The new Iomega disk is 35GB, that's 7-8 DVD's (depending on how you can pack files on DVDs). So the drive is 4x more expensive, and the media is >2x more. All for convenience of not changing the media quite as often during the backup. Few people will pay.
Sysadmins/power users who need to back up large amounts of data? They are likely to use tape, because they need 100s of GBs of backups, unattended.
But hey, this is not the worst yet. I can get a 160GB IDE drive for around $0.5/GB. That's still more expensive than DVD-Rs, assuming I can ammortize the cost of the writer. But it's about the same as the IOmega disks, and that's before the $400 for the IOmega drive! So what possible insentive could I have to buy this "Son of Jaz" at the price they ask?
I don't know if I see the market for this. This isn't for people who need huge storage capabilities. They could more easily use hard drives or redundant hard drives if they're worried about corruption.
It's not for the home user. Zip disks were for home users and did pretty well for a couple of years until CD-RWs kicked them out of the water with cheaper media, much cheaper actually.
The click drive, as far as I know, didn't do much. It was only 40MB and flash memory was more reliable than them. At the time it came out, companies were pushing flash memory more than mini hard drives, although now things are changing with the ipod and other clones. But this doesn't mean much for click.
They made their larger removable media drives but people still used CDRWs in replace of them.
So back to my question, what market is this for? Who needs to move around this much data at once? This has to be for people on the move, otherwise they'd just use hard drives. I like how they made the disks more secure by putting the reading head inside them, but that brings up media costs. It seems like they're just following the path they always take: "It's not selling? Up the capacity and charge more for the media!"
The disk is mounted inside a 1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm cartridge..
Am I missing the point here or do we really have a disk smaller than a dice?
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
Boy, Iomega is swimming up a stream that's going to be a hard place soon enough. Later this year the double sided DVD will come out with a storage capacity of 8+ GB/ disk. This means, to be competitive, they'll need to make sure their drive modules are less expensive that 4 double sided DVDs. Color me skeptical. Add to that a whole slew of new hardware coming out of the labs that will be producing huge nonvolatile storage in hardware, and the place for an iomega drive is looking dicey at best.
Don't get me wrong, I just won't be surprised of the compettion ends up eating their lunch.
Genda
Should be 10 x 8 x 8cm, not 1 x 0.8 x 0.8 which would be almost pea-sized. Not sure how someone screwed that up!
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Of course.
They announce this just AFTER I purchase an AIT-2 drive on EBay.
Bastards!
- The Sigless Wonder
For you, it's not such a good product. They do have a market, though. For the insurance office receptionist who can handle switching out DAT tapes, but isn't competent enough to know how little hard drives cost, that you can put them in an external enclosure, or how to go about opening the thing up, installing the drive (jumpers, plugs, screws, etc.), making sure that it's in the USB port, not wedged into an RJ-45 (it's happened), formatting it, setting up ghost to do a scheduled copy, swapping the units from Mon/Wed/Fri to Tue/Thu/Sat... You buy the unit, you buy a couple tapes/drives/cassettes/whatever, click through the install, and you've got a full backup on a regular basis with little sweat. Kind of pricey, and it's Iomega, but still. It's a decent idea, and I give them credit for that.
Tapes and zip disc have one thing in commong:
They seem to die after a few 100 read/write cycles. Of course this limit seems to be reached much faster by zip discs, due to differend usage patterns...
But i would NEVER trust important data to and dds4, dlt, exabyte or whatever tape that has been through 500 or so cycles...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The Register claims:
Iomega claims:
The use of this technology is for large-area sneaker nets. These people want this much space, combined with the portability of disks. Other geeks have noted that you can easily get a 100+ GB hard for twice the price. Sure, geeks love an excuse to buy more HD space, or better yet -- put together a dedicated RAID fileserver! However, the SOHO/PHB user would like an easy way to fedex 35 GB to their business contact, without oppening up the computer.
Backup tapes? That's not what this is for. What about CD/DVDs? Sorry: they are too small (CD, 650-800MB, DVD 9GB, with compatability issues), the don't act like discs (burning interface breaks standard file browser interface), though they are transportable. Let's face it, people want really big disks that act like standard, rewritable, transportable 'floppy a:' disks, not CDs.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Any reasonable software will perform a seek to the block the files you need are on, taking minutes. Shit software will scan the cartridge, taking hours.
It has to be said that DLT is *old* and usually not up to the job of serious backups given the size of hard disk drives around now.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I've always bought ZIP 250 (IDE, not SCSI) and have never had a problem. I've heard people bitch about the 100s but the price difference was never more than $15 and I never regretted that. Of course, now I just use USB keys. ^_-
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I remember using zip disks on campus, since all the labs had zip drives. It was a great way to keep your files with you, and zip disks were prety durable for use on campus.
That said, CDs were getting to be cheaper, but none of the computer labs had burners when I was there ('94 - '99).
Not sure what campus users are doing nowadays though.
now all bow down [click] befo[click]re your new Iomega overlord[chink]s.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
optical will be here for quite a while. However the nature of the optics may well change, ie different light wavelengths, different way of accessing the data besides spinning disks... at some point it won't be cost effective to include the hardware to handle obsolete discs (how many PCs come with floppy drives today? fewer and fewer..) it is not unlikely that cd drives will be long, long dead before the 75 year mark is reached.
-
I own both 250MB Zip and 1GB Jaz products.
When it comes to the Jaz products, I guess I've been lucky; I never had any of the carts fail. The worst I can say about Jaz is that it was expensive as anything and today has almost no eBay value at all given the low cost of writable CD and DVD products. (Yes, I realize this could have happened with any product or technology, but it's still irritating as anything.)
What really burned me was the way I was treated when I called Iomega with regards to a dead FireWire adapter that clipped onto the back of a first generation 250MB Zip drive. I sought replacement or repair but was curtly told, "Buy another one." So much for the warranty, which had about three weeks remaining.
Given how everything of theirs I own has lost so much of its value, along with the lousy treatment I received from their support staff, it's been an easy decision to make: I'll never, ever purchase an Iomega product again.
Just my two currency units...
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Wading through all these "But this sucks compared to tape!" comments made me think back on some of the late great backup media I've used..
IBM line printer; Dump the program to the printer in case the machine was powercycled.
Sony Walkman and a Dictaphone microcassette recorder with a cable between them
Notching my single sided game discs and copying other games on the back
Seagate 5mb full height tape drive, only took 6 hours a tape!
KERMIT to a Unix shell account at 1200 baud
Seagate 20mb tape drive, half height this time. Still six hours a tape, but you couldn't back up at night because the sucker made too much noise to sleep in the next room.
Software RAID of SCSI CDROM drives; took five hours to burn all 8 discs, but 5.6Gb of storage for about $4 in media ruled.
Cheesy off-brand 8Gb tape drive.. Two hours a tape was great!
Software mirroring in NT; No backup time, but for some queer reason 5% of the time you switched to the "mirror" it was missing data.
I'm currently on the "lending library" system of backups.. I burn a copy of everything as soon as I get it, end up loaning it to someone, and then have to call them and beg them for my discs back..
.sig: Now legally binding!
Speaking of Iomega website, it's not accessible for those of us who have the TCP ECN bit turned on. This has earned them an entry in the ECN Hall of shame listing. Their response? ... We can revisit this in
several years. It isn't a big deal right now ... To be honest, I would be surprised if anybody had a problem talking to
us because of ECN.
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn is the switch that controls whether Linux uses the ECN option or not.
FYI,
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
Back when I was a relative newbie and CD-R was still way out of my price range (about 4 years ago) I lost some pictures of my first son to the click of death on a zip drive. I had ordered the zip drive expressly for the purpose of backing up pictures. Fortunately I only lost 2 or 3 pictures and it was early on after purchasing the PC. I haven't used the zip drive since, and I can honestly say I'd never trust Iomega again. The positive side is that I'm now much more careful about backing up and archiving all kinds of important data. ...just not on Iomega products!
You can have my cynical agnosticism when you pry it from my cold, dead logic.
Its to survive a disk failure.
"Oh crap. This got all messed up. I need to restore $THIS_DIRECTORY to what we had a month ago...
And pull the copy from 6 months ago too, just so I can check it. Thanks, mr admin."
No, if this can be used (USB good) to backup the Very Large Drives of my relatives and friends who Just Don't Know Better, then great.
DVD @ 25GB (the bluelaser one) or multi-layer (50GB) has been promised and we're still waiting.
At least this is here.
So when to I get the 5.25" TB one?
What compression algorithm do they use to compress a 2.5inch disc into a 1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm cartridge?
My faith is expressed through Nihilism. Do you understand?
the compression is software-based, so they can claim any compressed number they want, depending on what they are compressing. It has nothing to do with the medium.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I was instead suckered into the whole Jaz drive debacle.
I'm ashamed to admit I was too. I wasted hundreds of dollars on a brand new AHA-2940 card and a SCSI Jaz-1 drive and three extra disks. Although I've never had the click of death from any of mine, the salesman who sold me this bill of goods (I was very naiive at the time) convinced me I could install different operating systems to each Jaz cart and be able to multiboot my computer by swapping carts. Well, it turned out the the original Jaz-1 drive was never a bootable SCSI device. Period. I had wanted to have Windows 95 on a cart, Slackware on another, and Solaris x86 on another. I eventually figured out a kludgey workaround by using separate boot floppies along with the separate Jaz carts, but it was so cumbersome and troublesome (and slow) that I gave up after a few weeks and now the Jaz drive and the carts still sit in my junk collection box. What an expensive lesson to learn. At least the AHA-2940 card did come in handy when I bought my first CDR burner (A Philips 2xWrite/6xRead SCSI unit that was built like an army tank and still functions perfectly) today.
Without reiterating what all of us suckers now know, the Jaz drive was the biggest most over-priced piece of shit ever!
Uhh, you left out the "F" word before the "S" word.
Okay, I'll bite. How in the world did they fit a 2.5-inch disk in such a 1 x 0.8 x 0.8 cm cartridge? (Or is this just another english-to-metric conversion problem?) I mean, yeah, you could fold it up into something that size, easily, but that's not very good for a disk.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
... except in whatever use, something else is cheaper and better.
... maybe you own a small server centre and want to offer backup to your clients. You can have one USB version of this drive and swap cartridges as you plug it into each server and backup. Of course you will have to manage the servers yourself as most servers won't have a nice accessible button to use on the front to activate a backup application automatically...
At home - CDRs or DVDRs are a lot cheaper and the drives are a fraction of the cost. The average user doesn't have that great a need to backup a lot of stuff anyway, or have a need for 25MB/s backup. Anyway, at $60 a go, you won't use these for archival purposes anyway. For a floppy disk replacement it would be nice though, although what need does the average person have for floppies that can't be addressed by a CDRW or DVDRW, a network or USB flash media?
So
If Iomega want to get this format accepted even a little bit, they need to open up the specification (maybe at a reasonable charge) to other companies to make drives and media. Optical writable media succeeded because it was a standard. One company cannot create a standard on its own.
Also my first reaction to the article title was: Isn't it a bit late for April 1st jokes? Then I realized that Iomega was actually putting this thing out.
I guess it should not be surprising that the "omega" part of their name, in Biblical terms, means "the end", eh?
Hey, keeping not really on topic, I've seen a million different companies and features on these pen drives. Anyone know of a decent website reviewing many of the bigger names or more reliable drives? Any other explainations of some of the features, and pros and cons? I've seen mp3 players, wifi radios, and other odd additions to this storage medium. Prices also seem to be all over the freakin place.
And, just to barely keep a grip on this topic, how reliable and robust have you found the pen drives to be? I've heard they're tested through a laundry cycle, with various levels of success.
Thanks!
We used to buy 1GB Zip drives because they were sort of a standard. But there was about a 50% failure rate on the hardware. Their quality control was so shoddy, we really couldn't trust them.
Also, the company was a magnet for investment scams. There was sort of a cult of the Iomega investor. I never understood that.
I certainly won't be an early adopter of this technology!
Best Buy can have you arrested
"Each disk contains its own read/write head assembly and drive motor, allowing the unit to be sealed as tightly as a regular hard drive."
and
"The drives cost $400 for an external USB 2.0 unit and $380 for an internal ATAPI drive. Both ship with a bundled disk."
So basically what they have done is created a high capacity, low-error inexpensive removable disk, and a $400 USB connector. I think I'll put this item right to the top of my forget-about-immediately list.
The cartridges may last for 30 years, but they're not likely to be producing compatible drives in FIVE years. Just my hunch!
The king of jazz will now be sueing Iomega for defamatory remarks
And it's pretty sweet. Had so many problems with my removable disk Syquest drives I fear any removable disk drives. Though I've known people with Jaz drives who didn't lose all their data on a regular basis like I did with Syquest.
Is this some kind of first?
And 400 bucks for the primary unit, that realistically isn't that bad, especially if you have a monster of a computer system that has over 120 gigs of hdd space that needs backed up.
Yes, it is pretty bad. You can buy an external 250 GiB drive for $70 less than that with similar data transfer rates.
Or buy an INternal drive for still less, and a docking station that lets you install 3" hard drives in drawers and plug 'em into a 5" bay.
I can get a docking station and one drawer for (whatever modifier is current) ISA bus drives at Fry's for under $20, extra drive drawers for under $10 last time I looked. You absolutely CREAM the price of their base unit, and for $200 you can get plugins for far more than the 140M of their four-pack of 35s. And they don't come in little chunks that make you change media several times to do a backup.
And you're not limited to one manufacturer. (Even if the docking station flakes out and you can't find a replacement OR an equivalent system to move the drive to, you can always mount the bare disk back inside your machine or run a cable to it as an emergency measure.)
I'm currently engaged in putting them in all of my machines - not just for backup, but I'm making the primary drive removable, too. Then I can pull it out when upgrading or migrating, plug it into another slot as a secondary once the new system is built, and not have to sweat whether a runaway installer might trash the data on the old disk. Then I can archive it once I've ported what I need to the new system.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I use removeables instead. You can get 40 gig 7200 HD drives for $50, larger ones are cheaper per gig. Enclosures are $10 to $20 with the trays running $5 to $10. Overall cheaper and you are spared the $400 initial purchase. I'm curious what speed the new drives run at? Also I'm still stinging from all the corrupted Zip disks not to mention a bunch of Jazz disks that died young. Iomega has just had too much trouble with reliability. My removables may be bigger and heavier but they are cheap, fast and reliable. Not to mention I can get up to a gig in storage.
I have a small business I help out with backing up of about 6gb of data now.
Their 2 year old Segate IDE travan drive and it's 50$ a tape counterparts is beggining to pack up (I don't miss it)
I've proposed to them this (I wish it came to me, but I found it in a newsgroup post)
5x30gb 2.5" IDE drives - 100$
1 USB 2.0 PCI card - 15$
5 2.5" IDE enclosures (preferably well ventilated ones with the nice rubber stoppers on each corner)
This solution will work with backup exec 9 (sorry MS man here, due to lack of linux knowledge) - but being a fully "mounted" (? right word) active disk after Win2k server detects it - you can pretty much backup with any method you like.
And it's faster than tape.
And there's a warranty on the media (hard disks)
And it's now cheaper
And I get more storage.
It won't be long before someone invents / builds a small box about 150mm x 150mm x 150mm with 3 2.5" raid'd disks in it ready to go as a backup solution with software and controller, about the only issue is if someone knocks the thing off.
I really look forward to installing this for this company - it will save me a hell of a lot of worries.
...that zip drive i bought never worked a damn :-/
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
35gb? is that they best they can do? l4m3!
The last 10 CDRW media I bought were free after rebate (just last week at OfficeMax). Ask her what 7 gigs worth of zip disk would cost. Of course, if I want to save the data long term I don't use CDRW - I use "cheaper" CDR's - I get those 100 at a time, free after rebate.
Of course, there are other issues too. Saving files that are too big to fit on a zip drive without having to play games and swap multiple disks, as well as not having to worry about the click-of-death taking your media and data to Iomega hell.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
WTF is this moderated as a TROLL for???
Anyone remember the Iomega Click Of Death and their waranty refusals?
Someone moderating from *.iomega.com??
The Technical Spec Sheet says Height: 1.0 cm, Width: 7.7 cm, Length: 7.5 cm. Which when rounded out is 1x8x8 cm.
They will charge 10x the cost per byte of every other possible solution. ZIP disks were obsolete 6 years ago as far as I was concerned, since CD-R or CD-RW stored more for a tiny fraction of the cost per byte and were more reliable and nearly as fast. If ZIP's had been priced at a dollar a piece in 1996, or Jaz's at $20 a piece, they would own the removeable magnetic media market today, but they have always arrogantly refused to lower their prices, dooming their products, good or bad, to oblivion. I used a Jaz drive for a couple of years to take data back and forth to work every day, but it soon became far easier and essentially cheaper to stick a harddrive in a removeable chassis. I've never considered IOmega products since. They were outrageously expensive and less useable compared all the alternatives.
Around 1994, I remember picking up a 340MB hard drive from MicroCenter or CompUSA (maybe they were SoftwareHouse back then) during their Buck-a-Meg sale. 10 years later the typical harddrive costs less than a dollar a gig, but Zip disks are still roughly the same price (with a factor of 1.5 or 2). Who needs 'em? For portable storage, I have a 256MB SD card in a little USB widgie that fits in my pocket and set me back about $70 total, and I don't need a friggin' drive to read the media. I can use any USB-equipped machine or my PocketPC.
This product could be really good, but if the media cost more than a dollar a gig, I can't imagine ever buying it. And with the drive at MSRP'ing at $400 or so, even that wouldn't cut it. I'd just as soon buy a stack of DVD-R's and another 250GB drive.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
i've had 2 iomega drives. 1 cdburner that quit working after about 6 months, and a combo dvd-cdrw that after a while would only burn a cdrom half-way through, and then the laser would turn off. it can still read dvd's though.
CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK
how are they still in business? They surviving on NAS?
I would like to know how they get a 2.5inch drive in a case less than a 1/2 an inch big as its maximum dimension ?
this is not a flawless plan.. this is inspiration
One 35 GB cartridge: $60. But: I can buy an entire 40GB ATA100 hard drive for $56 right now, and they're dropping daily. The Iomega requires a drive - the extra HDD for backups IS a drive, and requires no external electronics. Portable, and supremely compatible - I can use it on most computers on the planet, no extra parts required. To be slightly practical, I could buy one of those slide-in hard drive mounts for a few more dollars, but I'd still come out way ahead.
I'm quite certain I would be fired for that kind of behavior.
Lets see, the 'drive' (shell actually) is $400. Each additional cartridge (drive) is $60 for 35GB. Look at the alternatives - A cheap USB 2.0 3.5" drive enclosure is around $45, and a cheap 80GB drive is $60 (no economic sense to buy any smaller capacity)...
So for around $105 I can get an equivalent speed drive with over twice the space. I don't know about most of you readers, but I could put that nearly $300 to good use elsewhere.
But nothing beats the reliabilty of a good set of Magento Optical discs. I had some data i backed up on a 128meg disc that i can still access today on my new fujitsu 2.3gb model. If they could get the disc capacity to 4-6 gigs, while keeping the price at about 20$ a pop i'd be in heaven.
One company cannot create a standard on its own.
Unless you happen to be Microsoft, Intel, IBM, etc.
I would strongly advise you to do that because the drives are indeed still a piece of shit.
Iomega is a doomed company.
theres no point in products like this at the kind of prices they're talking about - $60 / 35gb cartridge. I can get a 200gb 7200rpm sATA drive for $150. I guess this is useful for transporting something really big, but generally a dvd-r or good networking is just great.
mebbe if they were $10/disc
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I was part of a preview of this drive and I was very impressed - it operates just like a hard drive - very well built - extremely fast and quiet - Cost effective as well - 350 for the drive and 50 per tape - only drawbacks I saw were the lack of network drive support in iomega software and the lack of adequate software compression in 3rd party products such as backup exec with this drive. All in all a great buy. Also has great features like the ability to drag and drop directly to the drive and use it as a bootable drive . . .
That's the real problem... Each one has it's own strong points, but none of them can do everything a floppy could.
How about bootable linux distros? That's right, so far nothing does the job, because floppies aren't big enough, and nothing else will work like a floppy.
I think the future will be bootable firewire hard drives, but baring that, this has a LOT of potential.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
<Nelson> Ha-ha! </Nelson>
Most computers for the past year or so and probably longer have supported booting off of USB devices. Ever tried installing a generic Linux install on a USB key and trying that? You'd have to disable swap though...
Doesn't it piss you off when the folks with the superior technology
lose to the chumps with a better Spin Directorate?
gewg_
your post could have only been better had you started it with "Pop quiz, hotshot..."
Thank-you, goodnight.
I remember back when I had a ZIP 100 drive and got the good old "Click of death." That damaged several of my disks and lost me lots of data. A class action lawsuit got filed against Iomega, it got settled. People like me had the choice of either accepting twenty dollars as an agreement not to pursue legal action or not accept the money at all. It will be a cold day in hell before I buy an iomega product again. I hope they go out of business.
Nope, never have tried that. For one reason, because I don't have hundreds of dollars to throw away. Floppy disks didn't cost hundreds of dollars, as I recall.
There are distros that try putting everything on a CD-ROM, and then writing on the changes to a relatively small USB flash drive, but that kind of goes back to my point that no one of them is ready to do the job floppies used to.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Iomega filled a market gap with the Zip drive. They offered 100MB of space in an external easy to transport device, with disks that were pretty small too.
At the time, you used floppies, or nothing. CD Writers were extremely expensive and the media wasn't much cheaper then a Zip disk. It made sense to go Zip.
They sold a lot of units. They had a corner on the market.
Unfortunately, greed set in and they never sufficiently reduced the cost of the media. Zip disks were just too expensive, and as soon as something more viable hit the market (cheap CDR's and cheap CD Media) they were out.
I still have my Zip 100 Parallel drive and it still works fine. I keep it around in case I ever need to recover someone's Zip disk in the event that they no longer have a drive to read it.
Iomega keeps trying to do the same thing, over and over. Jazz fizzled because media was way too expensive. Same with Zip 250 and Jazz 2GB. I expect this to do the same.
35GB isn't enough data to wow anyone anyways. 100GB would have been more like it. And if they are looking to replace lower capacity DAT backup drives with these things, I can't think of anyone that would risk on these versus the tried and true DDS tape.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Floppy disks are the main frame type for the small office or school sneakernet. Combine them with a post-it header or enclose them with a addressed envelope and they are routeable through peer-to-peer networks of co-workers. Just be wary of coffee mugs and staplers and it is the most cost-efficient wireless network available (how much does a grunt cost nowadays?)
Back when I was a student, on a student's budget, I was swayed by the $50 rebate they were offering at the time and I bought a Zip drive.
Within a week, click-of-death.
Sent it back, but had to wait for a replacement. Then they wouldn't honour the rebate because the replacement didn't arrive until after the rebate period expired.
I went on to use the drive, for moving files around day to day, and backing up certain files. One day, I needed a back up, and found that the disk couldn't be read. It had gone bad sitting on the shelf. In fact, 3 out of the 15 or disks had become unreadable. Have you checked your old disks lately?
For the new drive, Iomega claims that the disk will last 30 years. Someone once told me that even with so called lifetime warranties, companies are only on the hook legally for seven years, so don't expect anything longer. This should also be part of your purchasing decision.
Given this company's track record, I wouldn't trust any of their claims and I would recommend avoiding this product. As other posters have noted, there are other alternatives depending on your needs.
I've researched archiving using PC technology. I find optical CD-R technology only to last 10-15 years at most, maybe as few as 6 months to a year in poor conditions. The dye is the killer. Just leave your CD face up under a strong light and watch the data disappear. It is evident that IOMEGA has failed too many of it's users. I would not buy anything from them. Tape Drives are mainly in use because of reliability and life-time. My dream technology would be a static chip that would store 1 terabyte of information on it yet cost at the most $100 dollars with the drive costing $400. Static chips last an estimated 50 years while providing fast seek time and have excellent reliability. The chips would be standardized and made by many companies instead of just one. All new drives would be backwards compatible with previous versions of the chip technology making the standard last a lifetime. Archivists don't want to upgrade to a new technology. They want one technology that is reliable, fast, with a long life, that will last them half a decade or more. Chip, not optical or tape, is the the only technology that I see in the future that can handle the demand. Interesting technologies like PDOT may have their place in the future, but chip technology is more promising.
This is not flamebait...
But with RAID5 and S.M.A.R.T. on IDE drives, why bother backing up at all? I know in advance if/when a drive is going to fail, and with the RAID5 array, I can hotswap the dying drive transparently. No fuss...
I have 840GB of storage in my arrays, which means a paltry little 60GB drive won't do squat for me. Even a tape loader is not going to be as large as my array, so user intervention is still required. I'd have to spend THOUSANDS to get a truly autonomous backup solution...
Conversely, my Raid card was $400... I've replaced two dying drives (of the 8, 4x120 and 4x160 in two arrays) in the past 18 months. The replacement was completely transparent and flawless both times. You can't beat a solution like that.
So then my buddies bought Iomega Peerless drives! I was there in the corner wearing the long robe, wailing "beware the ides of March, Iomega are pants...".
Within a week my Peerless cartridge borked (is that the correct usage?) my files and I had to reformat it. Within less than a year Iomega dumped the Peerless drive from its range. I told you so!
I predict these new drives will die horribly within months.
Byt the way, are they called Iomega because the In-Out performance of their drives is so meagre?
I was going to post in response to a couple of different comments, but there were so many people saying the same thing that got modded up...
First of all, I've been using zip disks since at least 1995 and I'd never heard of the "click of death" until today. Honestly, I've heard the same thing on dead 3.5" and 5.25" drives. Yeah, they're customer support may suck, but get over it.
As far as the poster that claimed that zips came out at the same time as CD-Rs, this was most definitely not the case. Zip drives came out in 1994. As of mid 1995, a CD-R was in the neighborhood of $500-600. Hardly competition for a $100-200 drive.
Having said all of that, I do thing that Iomega has lost this market. Once the prices of CD-Rs came down and people realized they could use them, it was all over. Now Iomega is just evolving old technology instead of trying to create the revolutionary techniques they need for a real success.
Things to do today: See list of things to do yesterday
At that media cost I can't see the point, I can buy IDE drives for less than their proprietary drives, and use them in anything. Heck, I can buy hot-swap SCA drives for less than they charge for the media!
You just got me wondering there:
...) like a normal harddrive, WTF am I paying 400$ for? I mean, honestly, what components could they have required in the main unit that could justify this price?
If the 'cartridges' cost 60$ and hold everything (read/write heads,
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Honestly, IOmega screwed up the Zip drives in so many ways it's unbelievable. However, first I should mention what they did right:...
I'm right there with you. When the zip first came out, floppies were just becoming useless. Laptops still were too overpriced and underpowered to be effective desktop replacements. (For me, the IBM ThinkPad 600 was the first machine close enough to make me stop using a desktop.) The Zip 100 with the parallel port option was cheap enough and easy enough to use that I could move my work back and forth between my home and office PCs, or even go on a business trip and borrow a PC at the other end.
But a funny thing happened - the product never grew in any reasonable way. By the time the Zip 250 came out, the market had moved on. The Jazz drives were just incredibly expensive. Then CD-R, compact flash, and USB thumb drives made it all obsolete.
Flash memory, BTW, is a great way to save/move moderate amounts of data. I regularly back up my Quicken files, in case of a hard drive crash. I have a stack of small capacity flash cards that came packaged with cameras and such, but which were replaced with high capacity cards. A 32Meg CF card is a perfect device to save my quicken data and then bring it to work and leave it in a desk drawer. I don't expect or need "archival storage", I just want to get last week's work in case of problems require a reformat of my hard disk.
...is that when you ejected the disk, the drive shot it out with enough force to propel it halfway across the room!