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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 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
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.
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
Something that Iomega has been battling for years is the high cost of their media versus the need for a new portable standard medium. Zip, Jaz, etc... have failed before not only because they were too costly, but because there were still too many other choices to make it a common standard. While those wars raged, the home user market was sneaked upon and stolen by USB flash drives.
The only real battleground for Iomega is the medium-level server market.
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)
Well, I guess the person who modded you as flamebait has never experienced the click of death in an Iomega Zip drive or had the glorious responsibility of managing one of their flakey Win 2000 NAS products. Iomega sucks indeed. Please, less marketing, more quality.
Do you realize that with their NAS products it is impossible to do a bare metal recovery? Either you have to reset it in their management console, or order a new harddrive and rebuild for 8 hours.
I would NEVER trust these guys with important data.
ymmv
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.
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
Yes, it is pretty bad. You can buy an external 250 GiB drive for $70 less than that with similar data transfer rates.
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
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?
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.
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?
How old are those drives? The original (1994 or so) Zip 100 drives were very reliable. It was only once they got popular and started ramping up production that things went to hell.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
USB pen drives however are gaining more and more ground. Still behind floppy disks though!
Agreed, any removable, rewriteable, bootable, inexpensive medium where the data/format is easily dupilicated is hard to replace...
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
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!
4x250 GB drives = 4x$200 = $800 for ide drives
29x35 GB cart = $400 drive + 29x$50 = $1850 for these things.
The cartridges may last for 30 years, but they're not likely to be producing compatible drives in FIVE years. Just my hunch!
No troll, I agree. I had a JAZ 1 drive and it was junk. Iomega replaced it 3 times before the warranty ran out. They did not even question me when I would call and say it crashed and ate all my data, just gave me a return number, so I guess that were getting a lot of irate calls.
Man that was frustrating.
I have a small business I help out with backing up of about 6gb of data now.
Their 2 year old Segate IDE travan drive and it's 50$ 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.
Not only that, but your numbers are probably on the conservative side, I think you can buy bulk 170 GB hard drives for around $100, which means (using your inexpensive $45 shell) for a net of $145 we can get an equivalent speed drive (actually the drive speed isn't usually that critical, the bus often can't even reach the maximum sped most drives can handle) which is 5 times the size of Iomega's drive for less than 1/3 the price.
This reminds me of a story about DEC's disk drives. Don't know if it's true but I'll pass it along.
Back in the 1970s, Digital Equipment Corporation ("DEC") sold minicomputers such as the PDP-11 and mainframes such as the Decsystem 20. DEC also sold a high capacity disk drive which was about the size of a washing machine, had a capacity of 100 megabytes, and cost US $27,000.00. You could buy an equivalent drive from what was then hands down the best maker of the finest quality hard drives, Control Data Corporation ("CDC"), for about $7,000, but you also had to buy a controller card for about $300.00 because the DEC drives used a really stupid controller card and put all the smarts into the disc drive. CDC put very little intelligence in the drive and used the controller to handle it.
Okay, no problem, basically I remember people would say that they would love to be an all DEC shop but they couldn't afford it because DEC's prices were so high. DEC often pointed out that their equipment was of high quality and high reliability and that was why it was expensive.
On that point, DEC was absolutely correct, and here's the story: apparently someone owned both one of DEC's drives and a CDC drive, and opened both of them up to take a look inside them.
What they discovered was that the DEC drive was basically the additional circuitry not on its controller card, wired to... the very same CDC hard drive! DEC was essentially charging a 300% markup for a rebadged CDC drive!
Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.