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Data Storage

Iomega Ships 35GB 'Son of Jaz' 513

Posted by michael from the data-glut dept.
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."
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Iomega Ships 35GB 'Son of Jaz' More

Iomega Ships 35GB 'Son of Jaz'

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  • No way (Score:5, Troll)

    by Naito ( 667851 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:53PM (#8852750)
    it'll be a cold day in hell before you see me buying an Iomega product again

    • Re:No way (Score:2, Funny)

      by Jedi1USA ( 145452 )
      Gotta be better than that Sparq Drive I bought.

    • Three words... (Score:5, Funny)

      by severdia ( 745423 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:56PM (#8852785) Homepage
      Click of death.

    • Re:No way (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Trillian_Angel ( 542729 )
      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.

      An

      • Re:No way (Score:5, Interesting)

        by kylemonger ( 686302 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:18PM (#8853105)
        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.

        Yes, it is pretty bad. You can buy an external 250 GiB drive for $70 less than that with similar data transfer rates.

      • Re:No way (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Moofie ( 22272 ) <lee AT ringofsaturn DOT com> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:36PM (#8853313) Homepage
        My Bernoulli 230 died.
        My ZIP drive died.

        Twice bitten.

      • Re:No way (Score:5, Informative)

        by shepd ( 155729 ) <slashdot@org.gmail@com> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:37PM (#8853323) Homepage Journal
        >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...

        • Re:No way (Score:5, Funny)

          by Santos L. Halper ( 591801 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:52PM (#8853519)
          I live in Roy, UT, where Iomega's world headquarters used to be located. They still have larges offices there. When my Zip drive died, I called them, and they eventually sent me a new one. The wanted to charge me a nominal amount (like 50% of the original price). I can't remember if I talked them out of it or not. They sent me a new one, along with a box to send the old one back via UPS. Since I lived close to their offices, I thought I'd save them the cost of shipping the old one back. I drove to their office, and asked them to take the defective one. After 10 or 15 minutes of people asking other people what to do, they eventually threw their hands up in the air and told me I would have to go and send it via UPS anyway.

        • Re:No way (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @06:23PM (#8853888) Homepage
          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...

    • Re:No way (Score:2, Funny)

      by irving47 ( 73147 )
      cold day in hell? Noooo.
      It will be the day BEFORE we start hearing click..click.. whirrrrr click..click.. whirrrrr coming from your general direction.

    • Re:No way (Score:5, Interesting)

      by spacecowboy420 ( 450426 ) <rcasteen@NOsPam.gmail.com> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:10PM (#8853016)
      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.

      • Re:No way (Score:5, Funny)

        by blincoln ( 592401 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:47PM (#8853468) Homepage Journal
        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.

        Or even the incredibly poor quality of one of their original Jaz drives.

        I was suckered into buying one when I went to university. A year later I heard that KMFDM had lost an entire album's worth of music to a Jaz disk dying, but I figured it was just bad luck.

        Then I lost the entire contents of one of my disks (and the disk itself) when the drive at my part time job ate it. Losing a $100 disk is bad, but it's even worse when you're a student on a budget.

        That was the only time I've ever lost my temper and destroyed a piece of computer hardware. I did learn something funny, though, which is that if you throw a Jaz drive at a concrete floor, it will literally explode into various components instead of just breaking apart.

        I also learned that it doesn't necessarily make a good impression on new employees when the sysadmin runs into the lobby, screams "you motherFUCKER!" and then breaks something loudly.

        I think I gave my own drive away. I hope it didn't do anything bad to whoever ended up with it.

    • Mod Parent Up!!! (was Re:No way) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mankey wanker ( 673345 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:15PM (#8853072)
      It wasn't just how bad the product turned out to be - it was Iomega's failure to support the product. Double Plus Ungood.

    • a cold day in hell (Score:5, Insightful)

      by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:21PM (#8853148)
      Someone who disagrees with you clearly would rather mod you down than try to offer any reason why you're wrong, but many people including me strongly agree with this statement

      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.

      • Re:a cold day in hell (Score:5, Funny)

        by Stonent1 ( 594886 ) <stonentNO@SPAMstonent.pointclark.net> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:38PM (#8853338) Journal
        I remember those CDRW drives fondly. They made a series with a power adaptor that was a DIN connector that amazingly fit into the the PS/2 port on computers. The company that I was working for ordered about 150 of those drives and sent them out to our traveling reps with laptops. And it wasn't long before the phone calls started... "I just plugged in my laptop and a puff of smoke came out the keyboard!" What color is the power adaptor that you used ma'am? "Purple!" *SMACK* Good times....
    • ah.. I get it... all that clicking of death is supposed to be "jazzy" now I get it.

      e.

    • Re:No way (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hawkbug ( 94280 ) <psxNO@SPAMfimble.com> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:28PM (#8853224) Homepage
      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.

    • Re:No way (Score:3, Informative)

      by e40 ( 448424 )
      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.

  • Not for Home Users? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by l810c ( 551591 ) * on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:54PM (#8852755)
    It seems like Iomega has priced this out of the range of the home user market. $400 for unit + $60(%50 in lots of four/35GB.

    I could buy 3 large external hard drives [google.com] or more for the money. Any of the hard drives from Maxtor, WD etc. are less costly than the media alone.

    • Re:Not for Home Users? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SeinJunkie ( 751833 ) <seinjunkie@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:58PM (#8852828) Homepage
      But the portability is the real issue here.

      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.

    • Re:Not for Home Users? (Score:5, Informative)

      by WuphonsReach ( 684551 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:01PM (#8852882)
      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.

    • Re:Not for Home Users? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LehiNephi ( 695428 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:02PM (#8852903) Journal
      Iomega has always priced themselves out of the market. It seems they try to follow Apple's example: have a cool product and overcharge for its functionality. I would have bought a zip drive years ago, if it were not for the ridiculous price of zip disks.

      My university, on the other hand, bought into ZIP in a big way. There's a 100 or 250MB zip drive on every computer on campus. Now that prices on zip drives and media are falling, the window of opportunity has already closed, and everyone is starting to get USB pen drives or just run an FTP server from home. Now the university is selling surplus zip drives for $5 a pop.

      So drop the price by about 50% on the media, and Iomega could see a huge demand. But with a price as high as it is, don't hold your breath.
    • > I could buy 3 large external hard drives or more for the money.

      But if the hard drive mechanics went bad, you'd be screwed. Seperating the media and the mechanics improves reliability, because if the mechanics fail, you can replace them without replacing the media. You can also remove the Iomega media (for remote storage, etc) without shutting down your machine and unplugging cables.

      Not saying the price is justified or even competitive, but that such a system has very real advantages over hard drives.
    • Too expensive just for backup. DVD's are down to 50 cents, and dual layer 9 gig burners will be out soon. For backup, DVD's are cheaper, and I can read them back on any DVD reader.

      And if I want to move files, 160gig firewire/usb2 maxtor onetouch for 180 at costco, pick up 2 of these for the price of an Iomega with 1 35gig drive. (And faster too)

      But, I'm sure people will buy it, it is a USB-HD, so you can boot off it, and it comes with ghost, so you can restore a system. It could be handy. Little expensi

  • Good move (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mphase ( 644838 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:54PM (#8852757) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Good move (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Taurim ( 622805 )
      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...

    • Re:Good move (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Not_Wiggins ( 686627 )
      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.

    • Re:Good move (Score:5, Interesting)

      by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:05PM (#8852948) Homepage Journal

      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.

    • Re:Good move (Score:5, Funny)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:07PM (#8852975) Homepage Journal
      a new tape alternative sounds interesting.

      An Iomega disk is an alternative to a tape drive for data backup in much the same way that carbon dioxide is an alternative to oxygen for mammalian respiration.

  • The problem with Iomega is usually the price of their devices/media. Not mentionning the lack of interoperability and the proprietary aspect of it...

  • [Click] (Score:5, Funny)

    by OwnedByTheMan ( 169684 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:55PM (#8852770) Homepage
    Did you hear something?...

  • Reliability? (Score:3, Informative)

    by ajlitt ( 19055 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:56PM (#8852788)
    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.

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by strictnein ( 318940 ) * <{strictfoo-slashdot} {at} {yahoo.com}> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:02PM (#8852912) Homepage Journal
      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.

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:2, Informative)

      by gid ( 5195 )
      I think they've all been. I had was a SyQuest EZ Flyer 230 drive. Held 230 meg per cart, and was about as reliable as I am balancing my checkbook without a calculator, and about as fast to boot. I've heard similar stories about Iomega gear, but I think SyQuest was worse.

      Needless to say, this was the last one drive of it's kind I bought, since then, I started backing everything up on CDRs. And since CDRs don't hold enough anymore, I back up to an extra hard drive (in another machine) using rsync. If my

    • Re:Reliability? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Morgahastu ( 522162 ) <bshel ... fave bands name> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:12PM (#8853031) Journal
      They've addressed this issue (apparently) in this new product.

      Each tape has it's own read/write heads so nothing is exposed (or potentially) to the outside of the casing.

      This should dramatically reduce any chances of the data being affected.

      Iomega rates the disks as being able to last about 30 years.

  • MTBF numbers? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eples ( 239989 ) * on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:56PM (#8852798)
    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?)

  • If the article was read... it'd be... (Score:3, Informative)

    by canwaf ( 240401 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:57PM (#8852803) Homepage Journal
    10x8x8cm...

    1x.8x.8 cm would be a recipie for lost backups.

  • What sets it apart ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ThomasFlip ( 669988 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:57PM (#8852812)
    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.

  • Wow $400 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MrRuslan ( 767128 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:57PM (#8852816)
    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

  • Size is wrong.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gatekeep ( 122108 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:58PM (#8852822)
    The article lists the cartridge size as 10cm x 8cm x 8cm. That'd be one of those littls shuttle PCs.

    The blurb above lists it as 1cm x .8cm x .8cm. That'd be about the size of a wristwatch.

    So, how big is this thing? My guess is 10cm x 8cm x .8cm

  • No mac or Linux support (Score:5, Insightful)

    by adzoox ( 615327 ) * on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:58PM (#8852834) Journal
    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!

    • Ever try and backup.. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:26PM (#8853208) Homepage
      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.

  • Reliability? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sylver Dragon ( 445237 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @04:59PM (#8852842) Journal
    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?

    • I just wonder if these things will be as shoddy as Jaz drives were?

      A friend (hi Jayson!) used to have a Jaz drive and he loved it, until it started reliably devouring data without warning. We named it the "WORN drive" (write once, read never).

      I personally lost two drives and about 10 disks to the Click Of Death before the phenomenon was documented.

      I will never under any circumstances trust data to an Iomega product until they can go at least 5 years without selling inherently suicidal equipment.

  • is 35 MB enough. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Brigadier ( 12956 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:00PM (#8852862)


    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 ?

  • EE Times article and pricewatch (Score:3, Informative)

    by morcheeba ( 260908 ) * on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:00PM (#8852865) Journal
    Check out EE Times article [eetimes.com] on the drive. Of course, you could always get a 60GB drive for less ($47 shipped) from pricewatch [pricewatch.com], but if Iomega can ramp this up quicker, it'll get price-competitive again.
  • The second story down is somewhat on-topic . . .
    Tech support tales [hutnick.com].

    -Peter
  • IEE Spectrum in January had an article about this coming - I'm a little behind in magazine reading. Looks like it could be awesome for moving my server backups off server without making my bandwidth charges skyrocket.

    Unfortunately, the SCSI version isn't out yet - expected sometime this quarter I understand. The USB 2.0 and ATAPI versions won't work with my servers though. I only hope that typical SCSI removeable media drivers in Linux will work with it - they say Linux support won't be ready until the
  • I've been searching for a backup solution like this. I read about this earlier today and immediately thought, "Woah. This will solve my backup problem." Then I looked at the price and realized I could get a USB 2.0 or firewire hard drive for a LOT less money and have a LOT more storage.

    If it's compatible Linux, I'll certainly reconsider when/if the price comes down.

  • Too small, too expensive, too late. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by klocwerk ( 48514 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:03PM (#8852919) Homepage
    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.

  • Their web site erroneously states that the drive has "rugged 35GB disks that can store up to 90GB** of compressed data". Sorry, Charlie, but a 35GB disk can only hold 35GB of compressed data. Perhaps it can hold 90GB of data, compressed but unless they've managed to break the laws of physics, no 35GB drive can hold more than 35GB of compressed data. Clueless marketing folk strike again. ;-)
  • 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.

  • How reliable is this? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Cyph ( 240321 ) <(ten.ysaekaeps) (ta) (xinooy)> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:09PM (#8852994)
    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.

  • Iomega is pretty muched doomed. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by minairia ( 608427 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:09PM (#8852996)
    Iomega is pretty muched doomed. Already at the local computer shops you can by a 1 gig pen drive for 300 bucks. This is way too expensive now, but this time next year the same drive will be 50 bucks and it will be 300 bucks for the 10 gig pen drive, all made by nameless companies in China somewhere.

    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.

    • 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

  • In the second picture (right side)... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Michalson ( 638911 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:11PM (#8853026)
    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?

  • Blue Laser DVD will cast a shadow over this (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jmulvey ( 233344 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:12PM (#8853042)
    If "Son of Jaz" is pitched as a backup media, why wouldn't you go with a blue laser dvd [geek.com]? Media costs will surely be lower.

  • Excuse me for not caring. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Adrian De Leon ( 30979 ) <adrian DOT deleon AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:14PM (#8853067) Homepage
    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.

  • Why can't Iomega do cool stuff for standards? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by adzoox ( 615327 ) * on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:16PM (#8853092) Journal
    Iomega continues down the path of proprietary hardware .... why can't they take their awesome knowledge of storage technology and make standards better.

    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

  • One of my customers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by salesgeek ( 263995 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:21PM (#8853137) Homepage
    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.

  • Iomega's true genius ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by SmokeSerpent ( 106200 ) <benjamin AT psnw DOT com> on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:27PM (#8853211) Homepage
    ... lies in fitting a "2.5in removable disk" in a "1 x 0.8 x 0.8cm cartridge".

  • Iomega Still Missing the Market... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by __aagmrb7289 ( 652113 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:32PM (#8853275) Journal
    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.

  • Iomega - Kiss my well (in)formed ass (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mr. Cancelled ( 572486 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:33PM (#8853281)
    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?

  • New MP3 Feature (Score:5, Funny)

    by coene ( 554338 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:35PM (#8853298)
    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!

  • 35Gb is small for a tape. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Moderation abuser ( 184013 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:36PM (#8853309)
    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.

  • class action suit (Score:3, Interesting)

    by happyfrogcow ( 708359 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @05:44PM (#8853425)
    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?

  • Is the head in the cartridge or not? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by maxgraphic ( 737920 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @06:30PM (#8853970) Homepage

    The Register claims:

    Each disk contains its own read/write head assembly and drive motor, allowing the unit to be sealed as tightly as a regular hard drive.

    Iomega claims [iomega.com]:

    The disk and motor are housed in a rugged, removable hard plastic cartridge, leaving the disk heads and electronics - the most expensive and delicate components - in the drive section.

  • Tape.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by technos ( 73414 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @06:48PM (#8854241) Homepage Journal
    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..

  • So ..., I can think of a lot of uses for this ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hattig ( 47930 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @06:52PM (#8854298) Journal
    ... except in whatever use, something else is cheaper and better.

    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 ... 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...

    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.

  • And knowing IOMega... (Score:3, Informative)

    by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @09:32PM (#8855828) Homepage Journal
    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.

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