Re: IOmega

[kmself@ix.netcom.com]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2000 at 09:35:18AM -0600, Timothy C. Phan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>   Does IOMEGA JAZ 2GB EXT SCSI DRIVE work well in Debian
>   or Linux in general?  Anything should I be aware of before
>   go out and buy the JAZ drive?

No.  It does not.

It will work.  For a while.  Jaz is essentially just another SCSI
device.  However neither the media nor the drives are reliable under
long (or short) term use, in my experience.

My experience is a Jaz drive and six disks purchased since 1997.  I've
replaced the drive three times, as well as four disks.  Under Linux (RH
4.2, 5.0, 5.2, and Debian Potato), any media ultimately starts returning
sense read (or is it read sense?) errors after time.  When these get
sufficiently bad, the system locks up.

I recently asked an open session at BALUG what I could do to improve
operability of the drive under Linux.  The consensus response was "tell
us how far you can throw it".

For a price-storage ratio, a large EIDE drive is going to be a much
better investment -- 10-40 GB for roughly the cost of 2-3 GB of Jaz
storage.

For archival and backup, I'd recommend tape backup (I use an HP
Surestore DAT 2GB), or CD-W.

For removable, reusable storage, the Zip is a de facto standard (though
I'll refuse to spend another dime on Iomega), the Imation Superdisk
allows transfer of up to 120 MB at a pop and is compatible with existing
3.5" ff diskettes.

If you have a budget, you might want to evaluate MO (magneto-optical)
devices.  In a roughly 3.5" ff they offer 1GB of storage, though the
double-sided devices only offer access to one side at a time.
Read/write performance is significantly slower than pure magnetic media,
though faster (IIRC) than CD-ROM.  In particular, the write cycle
requires three passes (thermal, write, verify).  Massive components make
random access seek times very high, though sequential read performance
is much better.  MO reliability is quite high.  Drive and media are
relatively expensive.  Media are reusable, though most are rated for
only a few hundred write/rewrite cycles.

Particularly telling:  reading through Wired's masthead credits a couple
of years back, I noted that though ad space was dominated by Iomega,
their internal storage solution was MO.

-- 
Karsten M. Self (kmself@ix.netcom.com)
    What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

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