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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
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
Did you hear something?...
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.
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.
The Slashdot post is wrong. It's actually 10cm x 8cm x 0.8cm.
eclecti.cc
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
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
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 ?
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.
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
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)
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
The Register claims:
Iomega claims:
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!
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.