Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
10x8x8cm...
1x.8x.8 cm would be a recipie for lost backups.
The Slashdot post is wrong. It's actually 10cm x 8cm x 0.8cm.
eclecti.cc
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
About 7 years ago IOmega had a product called the Jaz drive that was like a 1GB floppy drive (at the time HDDs were in the low single GB range). It was expensive (as was the media) and was completely beaten by CDRs a few years later. However from what I understand it was much much faster and more reliable than their Zip drives.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
5400rpm 160Gb drives are now only $105. Add a $35 external USB enclosure and your costs are still below $1.00 per gigabyte.
(There are 7200rpm drives that are only $92, but I prefer the slower, cooler, quieter 5400rpms when mounting in not-the-greatest for cooling external enclosures.)
If they can drop the media costs to $15-$20 per cartridge, I think they'd have a winner.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
No, he just carried over the mistake from the Register, from whence he plagiarized the article.
He refers to the "Click of Death", something that happened to a damn lot of Zip and Jaz drives.
http://grc.com/tip/codfaq1.htm
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
Nope, I mean exactly what I wrote. It's funny how I started to get modded to Offtopic by those less geeky than me.
Sorry, but an FTP server at home is not a common solution, even for the nerdier section of the population.
USB pen drives however are gaining more and more ground. Still behind floppy disks though!
Total agreement. No way will I buy an IOmega product. 1)Bought a Zip drive. It died. 2) Bought a Click drive. Drive is okay but the Click disks keep dying. 3) Bought a CD writer. It died. I am way past the "shame-on-me" stage, as the saying goes.
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
CDRs are entirely inappropriate for large scale backups.
Even a single 120GB drive (not even the biggest out there!) is roughly 170 x 700 MB. If you really want to use 170 CDRs for a full system backup, you're more than welcome to.
Myself, I'll just buy some more hard drives and make a RAID. I'll be pissed off if the place burns down, but its not like I'd be taking the CDRs used for backup purposes offsite (not to mention the fact that 170 CDs + Thin Jewel Cases takes a significant amount of work to store).
Okay, quick look on the net - http://www.pricewatch.com/, and I see USB hard drives with 40GB of space for under $60. Why buy it from Iomega for more?
>Really, I don't see the problem with Iomega.
It's not just the reliability of their products that sucks ass.
It was their repair system.
It took a 1 hour, 45 minute long distance call from Ontario, Canada to Utah, USA to get someone on the line. That call cost $70 (at the time long distance was expensive) because their crap company couldn't even afford an 800 number. I had a couple the click of death happening on the drive.
I send the drive to them, again, at high expense (unless you are in the US they require international shipping to them in Utah -- DON'T SELL WHAT YOU AREN'T WILLING TO SUPPORT!). They say there's no fault with it and return it with a new faceplate (clearly the old ones broke off too easily). Turns out that the disks supplied and 30% of the other disks I had purchased for that drive were defective.
At well over $100 per support incident, I wasn't about to send the $20 disks back. Instead I ditched their shit products forever.
BTW: Let's not forget the abysmal website they had. So slow that it took over 8 hours to do a 5 megabyte download of their latest software. Yes, literally, my old 2400 baud modem well outpaced their website, which, in 1995/1996, didn't even use the ALT tag -- that's like cutting out 20% of your market RIGHT THERE.
Note that later they were sued for their absolutely unacceptable product repair support, and I technically have a $5 rebate with their company as a result of their court case loss (fat chance I'll use it).
In short, Iomega can burn in hell. I wouldn't *EVER* buy anything associated with them again. Period. Hell, if it where free I'd trash it. Even if they PAID me I'd trash it. I wouldn't want to accidentally rely on their company in the future. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...
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
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
Iomega's REV FAQ says the cartridges are 77m x 75mm x 10mm (i.e. 7.7cm x 7.5 cm x 1 cm), at a weight of 73g.
FAQ is available here.
USB pen drives work just fine with OSX and any semi-modern Linux distro. Basically, any OS that can mount a USB device as a hard drive works. No drivers needed, no proprietary anything. Plug and play on almost any personal computer you're likely to find still running. Your personal collection of Commodore PETs aside :)
Cross-platform with zero problems, solid state, small (mine's a keychain fob), reliable, and (getting) cheap. The best storage technology invented in the past 20 years, hands down. With 1.5GB models hitting $250cdn and still dropping, there's no end in sight for these things.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
WORD. (+5... Troll! I love it!)
I'm still trying to forget all the many, many hours and $'s I wasted on the f'ing Jaz drive. Let's summarize:
1. It was slow.
2. It was unreliable. A significant percent of the disks died after a few months.
3. The low-level software was pernicious. My win98 was always crashing because of it.
4. The high-level synchronization software was so bad I wrote my own.
I came to really, really hate IOMega and that device.
Click Death, a.k.a. the Click of Death, is the sound you hear when your Zip/Jaz disk (or drive) is probably trashed, beyond all repair. When all other methods of reading a portion of data fail, the last ditch effort of the Zip drive is to raise, then lower again, the reading heads in an attempt to reposition or realign them. This makes a "click...cah, click...cah, click...cah" sound: Click Death.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
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.
For home and small business use the volume shadow copy repository in Windows 2003 or a similar setup under Linux would be fine. Combined with RAID-1 or better RAID-5 it eleminates probably 95+% of need for removable media for backup. I personally still use an IDE sled for occasional home backups but they aren't really necessary since I installed 2003 (I'm an MCSE so the $ was well spent as a learning tool, I've also set up a similar concept under Linux). Hopefully XP-Reloaded will also include the volume shadow copy feature or something similar.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.