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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."
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.
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.
There's a niche between DVD-R and tape which is where I think iomega is trying to get in. For example, we have a 16 tape LTO auto-mount library in one of our SGI Origins. Those tapes hold ~200 GB compressed each, so we have to swap some tapes when we get to around 3.2 TB of data (that's not exact, some tapes are incrementals, etc)
Anyhow, they're mistaken when they claim it can replace tape. It can replace tape in certain situations, but not where you need a lot of backed up data available to the systems.
Trolling is a art,
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
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.
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?