Re: IOmega

["Timothy C. Phan" <tphan@iqrinc.com>]

Hi All,

  Thank you for you comments about the JAZ.  This what I afraid
  about.  I was going to use it for mirror the Debian distribution
  as well as backup device.   
 
  I thought JAZ would be better than SyJET which I have quite a
  few.  This SyJET would have the same symptoms that you
  described.  It sometime would cause system to have problem
  reading other scsi device while the SyJET just sit there
  do nothing nor mounted.  For weeks, I thought it was 
  scsi controller, the harddrive and even CDR recorder until one 
  day I loaned the SyJET to my friend for couple weeks.  Within 
  this couple weeks that the SyJET was not connected,  I did not
  experience any problems...

Aaron Solochek wrote:
> 
> Unfortunately, I must agree with this.  I have had a 2gb jaz for 1.5
> years or so.  I've replaced all of my disks twice, and the drive 4
> times.  Granted, iomega is good about replacing the stuff, paying
> shipping both ways and such, and when the disks and/or drive fails, you
> only lose a few files, it is a big pain in the butt.  I still have my
> jaz drive, I use it seldomly.  When it does work, which, for fairness,
> is most of the time, it is great, but don't bank on being able to
> recover the media.  I use it as temporary space.
> 
> Iomega did tell me though that the problem could be related to a
> compatibility with my adaptec 2940u2w, which at the time was an embedded
> controller.  They had patches avalible, or, maybe adaptec had patches
> avalible, but it didn't matter anyways, since they were only for the
> retail 2940.
> 
> -Aaron Solochek
>  leko@cmu.edu
> 
> kmself@ix.netcom.com wrote:
> >
> > 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?
> >
> > SAS for Linux: http://www.netcom.com/~kmself/SAS/SAS4Linux.html
> > Mailing list:  "subscribe sas-linux" to mailto:majordomo@cranfield.ac.uk
> >
> > --
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