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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."
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.
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
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
Really, I don't see the problem with Iomega. I used some of their products back in the old days of reallllly old computers, and I never had one flat out fail on me. And it was a bit convient.
;)
And if the thing really has the stats that they are claiming (Doubtful, perhaps, but if it even comes close) then it might be worth playing with, if you've got the cash to toss at the thing.
And, realistically, it is cheaper than buying flat out harddrives to store things like MP3s or movies. I could see their uses.
And as a backup device, if it REALLY lasts 30 years, I could see blowing 60 bucks on a disk to see what kinda junk I had on my system that long ago
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.
Thats just my $0.02 though.
-- RJ
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
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.
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 ?
I wouldn't trust my data to this even if it was 100GB/cart.
I fail to see how increased storage would affect your ability to trust your data to a device.
Casual Games/Downloads
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
In our computer room, we alreaty use SDLT 320 (160 GB uncompressed) and LTO (100 GB uncompressed).
I don't see any use for a 35 GB removable disc...
Iomega said the same thing in the past with 1st generation Jaz (1 Gb) when we used 2.6 and 6 Gb DLT tapes... Same old story...
Too little, too late, I'd say.
;)
I used to have a tape changer, but honestly, with disc getting so cheap, fast, and (as almost always) reliable, why use tape anymore?
And for offsite storage, you can always get fancy drive-rails.
For *less* than $400 (with a cheap-o Via-based system and *2* 200G Seagate harddrives from CompUSA for $99/each post-rebate), I have a backup solution with just shy of 400G of space.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't see how anybody with mod points could consider what you said flamebait. You're right - Iomega sucks, badly. I have had 4 or 5 of their products, each one failed horribly after less than a year. I lost lots of data as a result, hell, I even got a check in the mail from them as part of a class action lawsuit. If Iomega was smart, they would change their company name and hope people don't find out.
That's comparing Iomega's new product with Sony's obsolete one. Try comparing to AIT-2 or AIT-3, let alone LTO or LTO-2. 100GB LTO tapes can be had for around $60-80, IIRC. That's less than $1/GB. LTO-2 is 200GB uncompressed for a bit over $100 a tape. Drives are expensive as hell, but most of the cost for a backup system ends up being media anyway.
Disclaimer: I'm an engineer for a company that sells enterprise storage. We sell tape all the time. Disk is fast, but not portable. Optical (including CD, DVD) is slow and WAY too small for business backups. Tape is getting larger and faster all the time. LTO-3 is rumored to break the Terabyte per tape mark when it comes out. (Compressed, of course)
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
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.
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.
My Bernoulli 230 died.
My ZIP drive died.
Twice bitten.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.
Let's add to the fact that the JAZ disks for 1Gb were $100.00US or more each.
I can get a USB2.0 hard drive case, a Drive caddy/tray and 40GB IDE drives + a new caddy for 1/2 the price they will want for their drive and disks.
In fact my local Computer parts seller has 40Gb drives for $65.00 each and IDE drive sleds are $15.00 each.
add $55.00 for a high end External USB2.0/Firewire case and I have the same thing without driver issues and other problems associated with iomega...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The Register claims:
Iomega claims:
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?
... 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.
Ahh, but RAID can be a backup!
If you have 100 GB of data to backup, why not just build a few RAIDs to store your backups to? I will contend that tape drives still beat this method out, but extra RAIDs are getting cheaper by the day.
Even hand-built arrays of 2x200 GB are good to store 200 GB worth of incrementals, while a bigger array could store your full-systems.
We're finally in an age where terrabytes of disk space can be had for only a few thousand dollars. If that happens to be a full factor or 2 more than you need, you can start to use it to back itself up.
Just be careful to not put all your faith in one big RAID array, rebuilding disks in a 4x200 GB striped+mirrored takes a damn long time.
I don't know if I agree. The 250 doesn't have the ability to pop out different discs at will.
USB/Firewire drives are hot-swappable, I do it all the time. They cost barely more than $1/GB, much better than these.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.