[MacNN Staff]

Dear Sirs,

I've got an interesting question... Do you know how long the life� is for a Jaz cartridge? Well, if you don't, Iomega does. In fact, they seem to know it very precisely!

The warranty as defined in the literature on the Jaz case is to be free from defects in materials and workmanship for its life so long as you own it. Notice the critical use of the word 'its'.

The next sentence starts out as "It does not apply to normal wear..." Notice the words 'not apply�' and 'normal wear.'

Well, two days ago I had a call from a frantic client (a printer) about a Jaz disk that had 3 years worth of critical files on it that wouldn't mount.

He had been working, and all of a sudden the Jaz just stopped. After spending a few hours trying TechTool, Norton, Disk Warrior� and many, many different tricks� I totally blanked!

All I needed to do, was have his cartridge mount (which an error message window indicated needed to be reinitialized) and not screw up the actual data. I took the disk home with me so I could work on it that night. In order to not risk his data, I decided to take a 2 year old Jaz 2 GB cartridge of my own and experiment. I would copy various files onto it, reinitialize, and try different recovery methods.

When I devised a technique with my disc, I tried it on his, only to get a response that I would have to format his first. I then formatted my cartridge. After 2 unsuccessful attempts, I got an error message about my cartridge having reached its end of life!

"End of life?" I say to myself, what the [explicit] is end of life? As I looked through the Iomega help files I found an interesting tidbit.

(Are you sitting?)

It reads as:

"Disk Life indicates when a disk should be retired or replaced. The Disk Life Remaining� and Format Life Remaining� indicators found on the Disk Information window provide critical information needed to decide when to reinitialize or retire a Zip or Jaz disk.

"Iomega recommends that you periodically check Disk Life remaining� and Format Life Remaining� on all Zip and Jaz disks."

I wonder what retire� means? Well, for my client, who like everybody else I later asked (and probably 99.9% of your readers) had never heard of this, it means screwed in a major way!

My disk is now not regonized by any utility! They won't even recognize that it is in the drive. However, when I check it with the iomega tools, it shows that very same disk as having 0% Life Remaining. And when I check his disk it also shows as having 0% Life Remaining.

If we can't find a way around this, he will have lost TENS of THOUSANDS of dollars worth of artwork, and probably a few thousand hours, much less some incredibly pissed, and lost clients! (Yes, I know, go to his backup. But he, like a lot of people, didn't have one. I had given him grief for a long time about the importance of archiving. You can only lead them to water . . .)

The next day, as I traveled around town, I was telling my clients, and checking their disks. Many had disks that had less that 50 per cent Life Remaining� and nobody knew of this feature! Everybody would be seriously damaged if their disks suddenly unexpectedly stopped working.

You need to start a thread on this! I�ll bet you, virtually NOBODY has heard of this. I wonder how many disks have been sold because their old ones just stopped working? Does the phrase built in obsolescence� ring a bell?

When you connect the dots, it appears as though the disks are keeping track of the number of writes that they have had, and when they reach a preset number, they just stop working? And without any advance notice! And don't think you can just bulk erase the disk and then reformat. Because when you do that (it cost me an $80 disk to find out), the drive spins for a moment and then just kicks it back out! This disk is now not even recognized by the Iomega tools! There is definitely something written on that disk that limits its use.

You gotta hand it to em. Who'd have thunk it? You invent the drive, a proprietary self destructing cartridge (a la Mission Impossible), an artistically worded warranty, and an obscure tool, with equally obscure instructions on how and when to use it, to cover your tracks.

Voila, disks that magically quit� causing the user to buy expensive replacements, and plenty of fine print� to limit you liabilities. Ah, the wonders of creative marketing.

Sounds like Jazgate� to me.

Pass it on.

Sammy P
Louisville, Kentucky

***

followup

I called my client today to see if he had called Iomega. He had.

The man he was speaking with was not surprised by the term 'Disk Life,'
however, it was not something he could discuss. It was 'not on his sheet.'

They supposedly have an 80% success rate at recovering data (I wonder
why?). BUT IT WOULD COST HIM 800 DOLLARS!!. Needles to say, they were in
a vise, so he went on and sent them the disc.

I'll let you know what happens.

[This message has been edited by MacNN Staff (edited 06-02-2000).]

[Rocke Woelk]

Sheesh, what a hideous problem, and yes, I too have noticed Disk Life percentages associated with my ZIP disk, but did not know that there was some built in End of Life feature.

Say, while not likely a cheap solution... Drive Savers promises recovery of Jazz and Zip disk and are renowned worldwide for drive recovery even with fires and Drives pulled out of the drink. Take a look at their site and if you do get a quote, do let us know what they would charge. They may also be able to advise how to mitigate this issue in the future. You can find them at the following link:
http://www.drivesavers.com/

By the way, they are available to work 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week.

This is insane. What kind of company is this!!! However there seems to be a trick to this that starts the timer or whatever it is that happens. I've had my Jazz Drive with the original cartridge for over two years, and for the FIRST time after reading this post decided to look for this disk life ******** . I found it but fortunately found both disk and format life to be at 100%. From what I can deduce (but can't confirm, and won't) is that if you do NOT ever format your Jazz Cartridge I don't believe the trigger will go off. That's the only thing I haven't done and so far everything is still at 100%. I'm running MacOS 9.04 and the iomega driver that I'm using is version 6.07. With all that I haven't had a problem. Now if this trigger can be software related, I wouldn't trust any more updates from Iomega fearing that they may do something to screw that up too. In any case, there should be something done about this company, I don't believe this is legal.

I wonder if the disks would be immune to this "feature" if they were formatted with a third-party utility such as Hard Disk ToolKit instead of Iomega's tools?

[Misha]

Please don't forget to keep in mind that this is not necessarily some massive conspiracy by Iomega but that the cartridges may actually stop working after a period of time simply because they reach their threshold.

Still, it's curious that a utility can track the integrity of the cartridge's phyiscal state.

I too have been a victim of the Disk Life issue... a Jaz cartridge that I hadn't touch for a year (and had rarely used) only had 20% of its life left after checking it out (this was some months ago). The cartridge promptly died completely a few weeks later (a bad block issue of some sort that was far more than just a bad block).

I purchased some new Jaz cartridges and they all seemed to suffer the same fate, some after just a month or two of use. I'm guessing it may be because of my drive, but since it functioned fine for a year I have my doubts. In any case, I've given up on Jaz and have thrown everything Jaz related into a drawer in my closet.

While less practical for day-to-day work, CD-R is a far superior (and far cheaper) median for archiving files.

I have 3 dead Jaz disks currently sitting on my shelf. I would have 4 but the first one that dies on me got crushed underneath my boots and thrown in the garbage.

I can't believe I spent CAN$800 for the drive and up to CAN$140 for each of those damn cartridges.

The "Format Life" and "Disk Life" indicators didn't appear until a few years after the disks were on sale.

All I know is this: NEVER run Speed Disk on the cartridges, EVER
And from the above posts, NEVER reformat them , EVER.

Iomega deserves to die with the crap they put out. They already lost a class-action lawsuit a couple years ago over ZIP rebates.

I advise anyone with a JAZ or ZIP to go over to http://www.juip.com/ and find out the real scoop behind Iomega and their crappy products.

Reggie

If I recall correctly, the end-of-life isn't really based on time or number of writes or number of formats or anything.

I think the drive has a number of spare blocks on it (just like any hard disk) and when blocks on the disk go back, some of the spares are remapped.

However, Zip and Jazz disks, as you can tell, are extremely flaky and tend to use these quickly. After they're all used up, I think that's when the drive refuses to use the cartridge.

Now, the end-of-format-life, may indeed be time-related, just so it forces a reformat so bad blocks can be remapped. I think end of disk life simply is the percentage of these blocks that are left.

Like I said, I can't remember if this is exactly the technical explanation (actually, I'm fairly certain there's a more exact explanation), but I think this is the general way it works.

BRS

[Brian Marsh]

as someone else mentioned, the "life remaining" and "format life remaining" (not positive of the wording on the 2nd one) are related to the amount of bad blocks on the disk

at least Iomega gives the ability to check on this with their utilities, any other removable just dies (anyone remember using syquest stuff? or floppies? would go through them like candy)

depending on how used the disks are (I just write things to my zip disks occasionally, not as a replacement hard drive) they can last a long time

infact, my first zip disk I bought outlived my SCSI Zip drive (who's motor just went)
both about 4-4.5 years old.

the disk life stuff is in the manual (of course no one reads that stuff)

Did ya'll ever think that this is not an end of life feature but just that after a while removable media may become unreliable. Don't tell me that none of you have ever had a floppy disk die, the same thing will happen with any type of removable media after use and reuse and formatting and reformatting the disk will eventually fail.

[Brian Marsh]

CD-R media also has a finite life

be sure to use quality media (and maybe ask around to those that have been burning CD's for several years)

general rule of thumb, (based on my experiences, and those of people I know)
any CD's that look green (in the past) don't have a long life (sometimes the foil starts flaking after only a few months)
for me gold & silver has been pretty reliable (although most of these are just the foil sitting ontop of the plastic of the disk, it's vulnerable to scratches in the foil itself)

the most reliable i've found is the verbatim data-life plus with a protective layer above the foil (and happens to have a nice looking blue look to the foil disadvantage, doesn't work in all audio cd players, and some computer CD-ROM's)

any media can fail, a little research can help protect your data.

[wlonh]

the horrors of removable media... sure, any media can fail but HD's never have for me,
i own no removable media device though i used to...

[wlonh]

THIS IS A REPOST due to a misposting...


Topic: Jaz failures - send em back!
mdmuzzie
Junior Member

Posts: 9
Registered: Mar 2000
posted 06-02-2000 02:52 PM

Considering how much Iomega charges for their cartridges and the frequency of Jaz failures, it would be tragic if Iomega refused to replace defective cartridges.
Try calling Iomega to see if they will replace your defective cartridges. Be polite, but be persistant. The academic lab where I used to work sent back to Iomega 8 Jaz cartridges that refused to format any longer. A couple of weeks later, we got a box back with 8 brand new Jaz cartridges.
Chances are that when you call Iomega's tech support to get a return authorization number, you will be asked to follow a defined (but silly) procedure of troubleshooting. Be in front of a computer because they will ask you the system's specs, and then ask you to try a couple of things. Just grin and bear it, and play along (even though you probably already tried everything under the sun to get the disk to work before you called). Once you get your RA number, you are golden. Any type of magnetic media is NOT a reliable format for long term storage. A client that I freelanced for had 4 GB of very valuable files spread over 5 Jaz disks. They "archived" the files to Jaz, and then forgot about them for a year.
When they gave me the Jaz cartidges, about 10-15% of their files were corrupted. As a generous gesture (and to prevent furtherloss of files) I made a copy of those files to DVD-RAM. For long-term archiving or even short-term backup, the best purchase you can make is a CD-ROM or DVD-RAM burner.

I maintain a graphics department that uses 10 JAZ drives for "sneaker netting" between stations. I've lost about 6 cartridges in the last 2 years. I've tossed most of them.
I recently called Iomega Support about my most recent cartridge failures. I was pleasently surprised about how helpful they were. They sent me several replacement disks after I sent the bad ones to them. I wish I had kept all of those other bad JAZ disks!

I would suggest trying Iomega Tech Support for replacements.

Pheel

AS far as Iomega doing illegal things. What makes you tink Lawyers didnt' write that stuff about the warranty?

I doubt there's some kidn of thing forcing disks to go bad but I'd say it's a good theory. I know that Zip drives are based on teh same tech that floppy drives are based on. And in the case of floppies, well after about three years (this is solely from my experience) the magnetic stuff flakes off because teh binder has worn out. Thus you get bad blocoks. SO I suspect teh same thing happens on the zip disks but with a slight twist to how it works exactly, I imagine allocation of reserve blocks is thrown in soemwhere.

Meanwhile, as far as realiability. I've read numerous times never to trust zip disks. I haven't and have had multiple disks fail on me. The oddest time was when the disk warped physically, and woudlnt 'mount becuas ethe shape of it got disorted when spun at high velocities in teh drive(it coudlnt' bread because part of the platter had warped from heat or something). Quite frankly I don't trust those disks. Last I heard both the drives and the disks had something like a 50% failure rate. They build 'em cheap, fast, and crappily.....

I have lost a few Jaz disks in my life time. I will now be examining them a little more carefully now but I don't save mission critical data to them. It is more of a great device to take with me. If you need to back data up it is better to use a tape back up with a few tapes for rotation purposes. Not the fastest thing in the world but a lot more stable. I wonder how the ORB drive is? BTW I have had hard drives die on me so I don't trust them as well. They tend to last a lot longer but there is alwayst that mean time before failure number, not including software issues. Later

This happened to me too, but on a zip drive. I lost a two full disks worth of material, and had no way to recover it. Ultimately I considered the data a loss and tried to reformat simply to salvage the disks, but only one would reformat, the other was a total loss. Later however my drive developed the infamous 'click of death', meaning that no disk would work in it and basically the drive itself was hosed. This new problem ruined my two remaining disks. I subsequently learned of the abysmal quality of iomegas products via the many personal web pages of people devoted zip/jaz and general iomega problems that people are having.

I have since removed the zip drive and replaced it with a CD-R, which is far superior in every way.

I urge everybody with any iomega product to copy your data to your hard drive. Buy a CD-R (they are quite inexpensive) and put it on a CD, you don't ever have to worry about disk life (100 years minimum according to TDK) or magnetic fields ruining your data again. I for one will NEVER buy any iomega product again and I would strongly recommend that others consider the problems many people have had and ask yourselves if it's worth the risk.

It's not worth the aggravation to trust your data to something as potentially unreliable as an iomega product, especially given their track record.

Good luck!

I just have one question: You only had one copy of something worth $10,000? I have yet to find ANY media that I would trust $10,000 to! If I had that much money involved in anything electronic, I would probably make 10-20 copies of it and place in a variety of different places. Maybe even put one in a safe deposit box!

If this problem also concerns Zip drives, how do I find out the "disk life" on my zips?

I use zips and Jaz drives to move large files from computers from work to my home. I do not use them to archive nor do I work off of them just copy to and from. People mistakenly think that JAZ and Zip drives are cheap replacements for real back-up solutions and can be used like a hard drive-they shouldn't be. Macfixit also had a thread about low level formatting of cartridges something Iomega offers in there disk tools but when you call them on tech support they suggest you don't use it!? I don;t trust their stuff long term but this goes for most of the removable media market. Zips and Jaz are just better than what they replaced-Syquests. Unfortunately that speaks volumes for the removable media markets reliability.

Just a note - never store any magnetic media in safety deposit boxes. Too much steel.

Folks, I am a lawyer. Persons injured by Jazz and Zip drive's "end of life" problems may have claims that are enforceable in a court. I'd advise anyone injure by this "end of life" problem to consult an attorney. And where damages are significant to a particular person, but too small to warrant a lawsuit, perhaps a class action, consisting of all the persons injured, is the answer.

At the very least, persons suffering with "end of life" problems should report their complaints to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and their state's attorney general.

Hiya,
I work for a large PrePress house (50+ Macs). A few years back we started archiving jobs on Jaz disks (instead of 4MM DAT tapes we used to use) for awhile...

Every now and then we had to pickup items from old Jaz disks for new jobs when we noticed this problem and 10s of Jaz disks would not mount or be recognized by Norton's Utils/TechTool etc. for recovery. We Found out that some of our OLDER 1-Gig Jaz drives worked better than other Newer (2-Gig) Jaz drives! Fortunately virtualy all of our cartridges where 1-gig size. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure the 2-gig drives were actually corrupting the 1-gig carts volume-bitmaps,block size info, etc.

I was actually able to recover most of our data ourselves (so far). I use Norton's 5.x Unerase with A SCAN FOR MISSING DISKS and ADD CUSTOM DISKS combo to find the corrupted HFS/+ partition and then a CUSTOM SEARCH with REAL FILES checked and whatever other options... This works about 60-90% and it's alot cheaper then 800$!!!

On the other hand, this may not be a conspiracy, as many users have had virus problems etc.and we've had far less problems with Zip disks (though the Zip drives tend to get the click-of-death mechanism failures) I personally think that Jaz drives just suck and even more so after Iomega accuired Syquest (also suck)!

Eventually we got a Large Unix servers with freakin' terabyte raids and big real-to-real tape back-up etc. and the IT guy here has sworn never to buy another iomega product ever again!

Personally, I have 2 Zip drives and 40+ Zip disks at home and have only ever lost 1 disk (would not reformat anymore) after I was able to copy off 99% of the data on that disk. I don't work off of them like HDs (that's rediculous) and I don't expect them to last forever (they are pretty much big-glorified-floppys). I back them up to CDRs and reformat them. I never look at the disk life! Oh, and I buy IBM formatted disks sometimes because they're sometimes cheaper (force-reboot during reformating to make it reformat as a Mac-disk). If one gets the click-o-death, I'll buy another (since they are >90$US anymore) or just get by with one...Fine for my fun-stuff but if it's really valuable data, I ALWAYS MAKE A 2ND BACK-UP!!!

Hope this does'nt get passed by as ranting because the tips I've provided here-in are good and they work and (as far as I know) are original! Good Luck...

DaMacMan

This guy is speaking the truth. We have about 20 jaz disks in our shop and I decided check one out after reading his report. First of all, all of our zips say 100% life. But a jaz I used said 97%. So I re-formatted (short format) it and it went down to 96%, then I did it again and it stayed an 96%. So I did a long erase with verify, and it failed at the beginning and spit the disk out. So I put it back in while running Iomega Tools and then it said...get this...DISK LIFE 0%. I was shocked. So I ejected it, quit Iomega tools, then put it back in and the finder wouldn't erase it and it got spit out again. So I turned the Jaz off, then put the disk in, and tried some disk utilities, and they all failed. Disk Warrior reported "could not communicate with device".

So in a matter of five minutes, I accidentally nuked a $80 disk. What a shock.

The only upside is, we're not using our Jaz drives barely ever anymore, so its not that imiportant.

In a nutshell, the Disk Life and Format Life are the percentage of spare blocks left on the disk. As the blocks go bad these unused spare blocks are swapped in for the bad blocks.

When the Disk Life or Format Life reaches 0% you will begin to lose data. This is true for all magnetic media, including hard drives and floppy disks.

The differences between drives are in how many blocks are reserved as spares and how fast blocks go bad.

The Disk Life and Format Life info is supported for all Iomega magnetic products, ie. Zip, Jaz, Clik!. Look at Disk Info panel in Tools.

By long formating the disk using Tools you can increase the life of the disk. Long formating allows the drive to sort and reassign blocks and spares. You can usually regain all of your Format Life and some of your Disk Life. Long formatting is best done earlier rather than later. Don't wait for your Format Life to get low.

There is no conspiracy by Iomega. Iomega has done many weird and foolish things in the past but this isn't one of them.

In fact it was Iomega's engineeering team that fought long and hard for this feature of reporting the Disk and Format Life in Tools. Marketing was afraid of this kind of paranoid backlash. Some felt that informed customers were better than happy ignorant customers. Maybe Marketing was right...

Bulk erasing an Iomega disk is a bad idea. Critical information is put on the disk in a non-user space at the factory. Loss of this information by bulk erasing will make the disk unuseable forever.

Gentlmen,

I sent the original email, and to those of you who say this is probably not malicious, I ask . . .

1) Why should the end user be COMPLETELY locked out of using the disk? Why shouldn't he be able to at least READ, but not write?

2) To those of you who suggested not optimizing the disk, I ask, if these things are so great for video clips (as they advertise), who would be creating videos (like myself) and NOT optimizing?

3) Why isn't there some sort of screen notice with parameters set up by some sort of control panel to alert you when things get dangerously low? Doesn't iomega know how to do this? (I don't think that's the case)

4) If it's common knowledge that these discs are so vulnerable, why do they advertise a 'lifetime' warranty on the packaging . . . and then redefine 'lifetime' in the small print?

5) If when you are reformatting, why can't the grown defects list just be increased? Why should the disc COMPLETELY go 'south' at the time of formatting? Even old floppies used to format with less available space? (up to a limit, of course)

6) If these discs are so completely used, how is it that THEY can get the files back?

7) If THEY can get the files back, why don't we have that utility included with our iomega tools? Even if it would only let us recover SOME of the files, it would still be better then NOTHING!

8) Why is it that none of our other utilities will see a dead disc? And yes, I tried the custom disk configurations. (other than to force you to call them?)

9) I suspect when they CREATED this mess, the lawyers and accounts were also in the meetings with the engineers!

10) And finally, I just think THEY want it ALL ways. Discs that last a 'lifetime', a 'lifetime' that in reality is actually very short, and plenty of fine print to cover butts!

[spodie]

I have seen so many ad agencies and service bureaus lose tens of thousands of dollars worth of material stored on Jaz and Zip cartridges over the years, ant it only leads me to one conclusion: don't trust Jaz or Zip disks with anything that is irreplaceable! I constantly harp on my customers to start some sort of backup system, even if it's just floppies, because some backup is better than no backup at all. Unfortunately, most of my customers learned too late not to trust Iomega products. I have seen upwards of 20 Jaz drives and 85 cartridges bite the proverbial dust around here, mostly from using them as backup devices. The appeal is irresistable: cheap drive plus cheap cartridges equals cheap backup, and cheap backup is no lie. If you have thousands of dollars worth of data that needs to be saved, why would you put it on a medium that has an advertised life expectancy? Do it right! Shell out the money and buy a tape backup drive and make multiple copies stored in different places. A tape backup is not infallible by any means, but it is guaranteed to be a safer mode of backup than Jaz or Zip. And you can get tape drives with capacities of 40-60 GB, so backing up an entire network of computers in one fell swoop isn't out of the question. SyQuest was good while it lasted, and we didn't have multi-gig hard drives to back up. But still, for removable storage, I'll still pick a SyQuest drive any day over any Iomega product for the simple fact I have never seen a cartridge go south, even with heavy formatting. SyQuest is dead and gone so the argument over which one is better is moot. CD-R and CD-RW drives are nice for small, incremental backups, but if you want the defacto industry standard for large backup technology, you just can't go wrong with a tape drive. I sincerely hope Iomega goes belly-up one of these days because of the crap they have put on the market - anyone remember the Bernoulli drive??

[Scott_H]

Hi,

We have Jazz drives on our UNIX machines. I think the drivers came from SGI. I wonder if they would mount and read the disks? Anyone try Xplatfom mounting?

Scott H.

I've had a 1 gig Jaz drive since 1996, although I had to have it replaced early on. Have also used the same 3 disks from that era for backup using Retrospect. Never a problem.

I have a 4th disk as well for updates, utilities and ER system startup. It HAS given me fits in the past. Every so often, without warning one of the two partitions wouldn't mount. And several times, after using Norton and Disk Warrior, everything would be lost, especially when using DW and then NDD in that order. BUT I've always been able to reformat.

Now, here's a twist. I've always used FWB's HDT to format these disks, and the problems with my 'ER' disk only occurred with Mac OS 9.X and HDT 3.0.2, a combination which FWB discouraged, even with fixed hard disks. Now that I've updated all the 3.0.2 drivers to the 4.0 upgrade drivers, I've had zero problems at all.

I wonder if others could comment on using drivers other that Iomega's. I think someone earlier also asked this question.

Thanks for any help.

PS - Just bought a burner, and will move all my backups to CDs ASAP. Had planned to do this anyway, then use the Jaz disks for MP3s and for setting up 650Mb volume partitions for burning purposes. Of course, I will back up my Jaz disks to CD as well!

[This message has been edited by Rohn (edited 06-03-2000).]

[This message has been edited by Rohn (edited 06-03-2000).]

The long and the short of this whole situation is that Iomega's products are just not reliable. I have had to learn this the hard way, as apparently many others have. After losing 5 years of work to a Jaz disk (which I wrongly assumed was a good place to archive my data), I simply stopped using Iomega products. I would encourage others to do the same. Despite Iomega's overwhelming prescence in the removable media market, there are other options.

My favorite alternative is 3.5" Magneto-Optical Disks. This technology has actually been around for quite some time. In fact, much longer than Zip and Jaz. But, it lost out to Iomega's marketing machine several years ago. However, I understand it is popular in Europe and Japan. When you are writing data, it uses a laser to heat the disk. But, once you are done writing data, the media cools and becomes as static as a CDROM. At that point, it is almost indestructable. You can pour a cup of coffee on the disk, wipe it off, stick it in the drive, and it will still work. You can even stick it to your fridge with a magnet. The dirves are more expensive, but the media is much cheaper per megabyte than either Zip or Jaz. The initial investment is well worth the security this media offers. Fujitsu and Sony are really the only two companies working on this technology, and Fujitsu seems to be the only folks making drives. But, they are good quality drives. The disks come in 1GB, 650MB, 512MB, 256MB, and 128MB sizes. All the sizes work in the same drive.

I would encourage everyone to check this technology out. It is really very good. With more demand, the drive prices will come down, and its price will be as competitive with Zip and Jaz as its technology already is.
http://www.buyfcpa.com/searchresults.asp?search_id=3

This might be of some help:

First, I agree that Iomega drives are among the worst and least reliable products I've ever used. After two Jaz drives and three Zip drives, I've decided never to own another Iomega product, and strongly advise people against purchasing them. I can't count the number of my clients who have experienced problems with these products.

One thing that might help in last-resort situations is using Silverlining (a media formatting utility from Lacie) to replace the Jaz/Zip driver with the Silverlining driver. This has saved my backside a couple of times. Now, if you have media which immediately requests that you initialize it upon insertion, this can sometimes get pretty tricky. Sometimes I've also run into issues that cause the Jaz/Zip to immediately eject once the Finder tries to access them, so you can't even reformat the disk with a third part utility. So, here is what to do in the worst-case.

1) Leave the Jaz/Zip cartridge out at bootup.
2) Run Silverlining and then use something like Terminator Strip to quit the Finder (thus leaving Silverlining the only running application). This prevents the Finder from automatically ejecting some types of damaged media or just crashing, which can also happen with some types of media problems.
3) Insert the media, use Silverlining to "Rescan" the SCSI bus, and then try using Silverlining to "Install" its own driver once the drive shows up (you may have to rescan the SCSI bus a couple times).
4) If sucessful, you will hopefully have a readable disk when complete. Note that once the Silverlining driver is on the disk, you'll have to leave the disk in the drive at bootup or it usually won't mount later on.

BTW: This basic procedure can also work for non-removable media drives, like normal hard-drives. If the Finder insists on unmounting the drive at bootup (or just crashes), and the drive is external, leave the drive off until you get into Silverlining, and then follow the basic instructions above. I've even had to "hot-plug" the power cable on internal drives occasionally to use this method of repair, and this has also worked fine, but obviously I can't suggest this as an especially safe thing to do ;-)

Generally, this method may work in situations where the drive, media and data are esentially good, but the driver (basically a tiny piece of software which resides invisibly on the drive media) itself has become damaged.


------------------
========================
David Butler
The Grand Panjandrum Macintosh Services
http://www.grandpanjandrum.com
========================

Oh, yeah, for those of you who just want to reformat an old "0% life" Jaz/Zip disk, you will probably find that Silverlining and maybe some other third-party utilities can do this where the Iomega Tools can't. Remember, however, that you'll usually have to have the disk in the drive at bootup in order for it to mount on the desktop.

------------------
========================
David Butler
The Grand Panjandrum Macintosh Services
http://www.grandpanjandrum.com
========================

I own a few Zip drives, and some of the disks have indeed failed. Luckily, I have never trusted important data to a Zip, and so have yet to lose anything really valuable.

My preferred removable media is the 3.5 inch MO (magneto-optical). The technology has been around for years in Japan and is _very_ reliable, although few people in North America use it. I suppose that price and availability have been the main issues in its relative lack of popularity outside of Japan. But then again, over the years I have found that the reliability and sheer peace of mind have been worth the cost of entry, many times over. MOs come in 230MB, 640MB or 1.3GB capacities, both discs and drives are available from a variety of manufacturers, SCSI, USB & 1394 versions can all be had. MOs don't require any special utility. The Finder, Norton Utilities, Disk Warrior, FWB, B's Crew etc. all work fine on them. The discs themselves are well-neigh indestructable, and can be copied to, rewritten and reformatted seemingly without limit. An MO also works fine as a startup disc. You can get a box of five 640 MB discs for about 2000 yen here in Tokyo. I picked up a 1.3GB SCSI MO drive for 39,800 yen a few months back. The only caveat is that the drives aren't that fast, so don't expect that much in the way of read/write speed.

MOs are the preferred portable and backup media at most of the Tokyo ad agencies that I have worked at. For whatever reason, it doesn't seem that Iomega products are considered appropriate for mission-critical use here.

>I sent the original email, and to those of you who say this is probably not malicious, I ask . . .

It is categorically NOT malicious. The engineers at Iomega are good people. As humans, they do at times make mistakes or bad decisions though. These are usually called bugs.

Since the specific problem is not known, give Iomega a chance to respond to it after they have had a chance to evaluate the disk. A lot of speculation on a course of action by users or Iomega is unproductive without further facts.

And it should be pointed out that the Disk Life and Format Life are not influenced by what driver you are using. It is completely controlled by the drive's firmware. Using Silverlining or any other driver will not enhance your disk or format life.

>1) Why should the end user be COMPLETELY locked out of using the disk? Why shouldn't he be able to at least READ, but not write?

You are not locked out of the disk by any malicious function of Iomega's driver or firmware. Some data on the disk is probably bad for an unknown reason that prevents the operating system or driver from mounting or reading the disk. Somewhere in the reading or mounting process an error is occuring.

>3) Why isn't there some sort of screen notice with parameters set up by some sort of control panel to alert you when things get dangerously low? Doesn't iomega know how to do this? (I don't think that's the case)

Yes, Iomega knows how to do this. Marketing shot down this exact idea. They didn't want to draw too much attention to the fact that Iomega disks do go bad over time, as do all disks.

If you want this feature, submit it to Iomega.

Consider this, your hard drive's disk and format life are going bad as you read this. Do you know how much life your hard drive has left? So where's the conspiracy? At least Iomega is being open and honest about the state of the disk. Would you really want this feature taken away now that you know what it is? Wouldn't you like all your magnetic drives to have the same feature?

>4) If it's common knowledge that these discs are so vulnerable, why do they advertise a 'lifetime' warranty on the packaging . . . and then redefine 'lifetime' in the small print?

All magnetic disks are so vulnerable. Iomega will at least replace it forever instead of only within 1 to 5 years. The lifetime of the disk in the warranty is in no way that I'm aware of attached to the Disk Life feature. The warranty was written before the Disk Life feature was put into the product. What lifetime means would be something the courts would have to decide if it ever became an issue. I don't see why it should. But then again, I'm not a lawyer.

>5) If when you are reformatting, why can't the grown defects list just be increased? Why should the disc COMPLETELY go 'south' at the time of formatting? Even old floppies used to format with less available space? (up to a limit, of course)

The robustness of low-level formatting could be improved. There are many options for handling the defects list that are not exposed to the user. There are also many ways of responding to errors. Iomega has created a very simplistic interface that is reasonable for 99% of their target audience. This is clearly an opportunity for third parties.

Submit this as a feature request.

6) If these discs are so completely used, how is it that THEY can get the files back?

How can they get the files back? Are you kidding? They are the only storage peripheral left that makes the drive, the firmware, and the software. They have complete control over the entire process. Kind of like Apple.

Disks aren't used like toilet paper. The blocks are still there holding data. Just ask the FBI or NSA. Whether it is the data you want or not is another question.

Why does Tools indicate a disk and format life of 0%? I don't know. It could simply be a bug in Tools that is misrepresenting the true Disk Life. Or the Disk Life may actually be 0%. Whether there is a bug in firmware or hardware that unnaturally effects Disk Life is something for Iomega to determine and respond to.

*** Until then it is utterly irresponsible to make wild, unsubstantiated allegations that smear the reputation of a person or company. I believe lawyers also have term for this as well. If I were Iomega, I wouldn't feel too gracious in recovering your data after the posting you made. Would you? ***

7) If THEY can get the files back, why don't we have that utility included with our iomega tools? Even if it would only let us recover SOME of the files, it would still be better then NOTHING!

In general no utility is required by Iomega to provide. The recovering of data is usually a volume format corruption in probably 99.99999% of the time. So the question is why can't Norton, DiskWarrior, et al recover the data. Iomega doesn't write utilities to fix volume format errors.

If it is not a volume format error, then there isn't likely to be a software utility that can fix the problem.

8) Why is it that none of our other utilities will see a dead disc? And yes, I tried the custom disk configurations. (other than to force you to call them?)

First, the reason the disk is unusable to _you_ is not known. Simply changing the first two bytes on the disk in Block0 will create a volume error and make the disk unusable by the operating system. That is why we have Norton, DiskWarrior, et al. Why they can't recover the disk is an answer Norton, DiskWarrior, et al would like to know as well. Call them; sometimes errors are quicker and easier to deduce by the reasoning of humans than the brute force of computers.

9) I suspect when they CREATED this mess, the lawyers and accounts were also in the meetings with the engineers!

Engineers would never condescend to meet with lawyers unless there is patent involved. <G>

Originally posted by Finny:
Just a note - never store any magnetic media in safety deposit boxes. Too much steel.

Just so people don't get alarmed and misled by this guy's advice...actually the best way to protect magnetic media is to store it in a container made of any conducting metal - copper, steel etc. In engineering lingo it's called a "Faraday cage" and can be as thin as a mesh whose holes are below a certain size (the EM frequencies filtered out depend on mesh size) but it's efficacy certainly isn't hampered by excessive thickness!!

So if you have magnetic media stored in safety deposit boxes (this includes videotapes, etc) you can happily keep them there, they'll be fine, at least electromagnetically speaking.

[Martin Mraz]

OK, I've registered now...cool. After reading all of the posts on this subject it seems that Iomega has been slammed a bit unfairly by some people. All magnetic storage media are failure-prone, that's just a fact...none more so than removable media, which are by their nature subject to all sorts of physical and electromagnetic stresses. Yes, Iomega has had what I would view excessive failures...but certainly giving users a tool to track the state of their disks is not something they should be taken to task for.

The hard drive in my brand spanking new G4 died irrevocably after only two months. Luckily it was acting flaky at first so I backed everything up to CD. When it died, I didn't even get the floppy icon with the flashing question mark, just a blank white screen. Certainly no "disk life" warnings available in this case!! Perhaps it could have made a difference...

On the related topic of backing up data and overall media reliability, I hope everyone has been following the thread regarding CD-ROM quality...it's one thing to have unreliable Jaz and Zip drives, that's something I at least have been taking for granted for the last few years, and it's quite another to realize that my backups on those "gee what a great deal, only $11.99 (Canadian) for 10!!" budget CD's may be nowhere near as safe as I had assumed....THAT story is the one that should be giving us all pause for thought!!

I think my Zip drive is great, but I'd never use it for backup. From now on, I'm using only the best CD's for backup, and the cheap ones will do for mixed audio CD's for the car and for sneakering larger amounts of data, etc.

[Cipher13]

Okay people, now is the time to tell those iomega people what you want in their next drive... and seeing is at least 1 iomega staff member who has posted in this thread (Severian and Cornelius may be the same person...), there is no reason not to put it right here...
I've never had any experiences with iomega products whateoever, so I can't say anything about them - I have had a burner for 6 months and its perfect for me. Backups that may as well last forever (with good media) and a 0% failure rate for me since moving to the G4. FYI I use Verbatim Data-Life Plus (the deep blue ones mentioned above somewhere).
Anyone know whether I could get an MO drive that would go in the Zip housing on a Sawtooth?
I have been looking into MO for a while...

Cipher13

Uhm about the steel box thing. I think the only area for concern is if the box is magnetized, then you've got problems storing magnetic media in it. Theoretically anything u pto a EMP blast fro a nuclear bomb wouln't touch the thing in the box. Seeing how it's a albeit crude faraday cage.

As far as reliability of zip/jaz disks, dont' use them as HD's. well sort of.

Here's what I think they should be considered to be as and used as:Cheap disposable hard drives. They'r enot as fast, dont' cost as much and aren't as realiable. yet they do act somewhat effectively as a hard drive. Thus they're basically a disposable HD. They do seemingly wear out QUITE a bit faster. Dn't put anything important on them, and watch out for the click of death, enuf said

[Cipher13]

As far as the use of Zips goes, all that I would use them for is transporting files. I wouldn't work off them, or use them for archiving or backups, just as transport. Much like a CD-RW, but nowhere near as good.

Cipher13

[Misha]

Cost of a Jaz 2 GB cartridge is what? $100 or so? And the cost of a 10 GB IDE drive is what? $100 or so?

I have had good luck with Zip in the past, but my experience with Jaz has been nothing but a headache. The fact that a low-level format using Iomega Tools can destroy a cartridge is testament to the fact that Iomega should not offer this feature!

Hard drives don't have disk life remaining gagues because all new drives are guaranteed for at least 200,000 hours of use, which is far more than anyone ever actually uses them for. I've had Jaz cartridges die with just a couple hours of use under their belt, if that. Whether I reformatted them or not shouldn't matter. Two hours of life or less is just ridiculous.

[Todd Madson]

This brings us to a very interesting question: I'm the owner of a Roland VS-840 workstation. It's a multitrack digital audio recorder for musicians that uses the original Zip drive as its storage medium. By its very nature, it's doing tons of disk I/O during recording and tons of disk reading during playback. I have yet to experience a failure, but since it's not connected to a computer it's not like I can use a "life expectancy" utility. I have a handful of ZIP cartridges and I store them in the box in a cool dry place when not being used and I try not to use them too excessively, when I'm done with a project I move to another disc. I try and rotate the discs so that any wear accrued is spread evenly. I also never format them using the internal utility, I just delete whatever music I've worked on and re-record. And then I dump the data to the G4 and back up individual tracks to a CD-r. I've been a bit worried since I've heard about the click of death, but for the most part they do work.

For the record: SYQUEST LIVES.

They have a web-site and they can also be reached at <sales@syquest>. I just bought an EZ Flyer to replace an EZ Drive 135 that bought the farm. Syquest products do fail; don't they all. But perhaps not as cynically as the Zip and Jaz drives.

The EZ Driver 135 has truly gone away. (Couldn't be that it still remains a threat to Iomega's total dominance, could it?)

However, you can still get the EZ Flyer 230 MB which uses both Syquest 135 disks and the 230 MB disks. The transfer times are great.

The EZ Flyer was around a hundred bucks with one 230 MB disk.

And there's something satisfying about using Syquest instead of the Microsoft-like Iomega, don't you think?

Iomega with its kind of arrogance that should offer a large-print explanation of disk life and format life and a straightforward warranty instead of one back-breakingly prepared by attorneys.

In terms of archiving, I've been advised by Pierce Rafferty of the Archives Project that the best tactic is multiple copies stored in different places. You want your stuff to survive, disseminate, disseminate, dissemenate.

Over and out.

I think your theories are right. To confirm I found the zip tools disk that came with my original zip drive - I've owned 6 both internal and external. In the apple get info dialog box the disk was created in 1995(5 years old) The life of the disk - according to the iomega tools dialog box is still 100%, so by not reformatting a user would never trigger the "timer" so to speak.

Every Syquest product I bought was unreliable. (40Mb, 8-Mb, 270Mb)
I've had my iomega Jaz 1Mb for 3 years without trouble.
Now I'll have to check them!
As the man says:
disseminate, disseminate!

Using 3 Macs and 3 Zip Drives - oldest Mac and Zip are seven years - newest iMac and Zip are 4 months.

After reading all of the foregoing, I spent all weekend evaluating my Zip disks and reformatting those that needed it - result? All my disks are at 100% formatting life - 75% of my disks are at 90 to 100% disk life - 25% range from 44% disk life to the mid sixties.

In the seven years, I have not had a single disk go bad or fail!

CONSIDER - last year I accidently initialized the HD on my main computer with all my crucial data! (Don't even ask how!)

I phoned Dantz (the makers of DiskFit Direct which used to be bundled with the Iomega software) and within 2 minutes I was put through to a tech rep who told me how to restore my HD from the Zip. It took all of 13 minutes and I was back in operation!

If all 3 of my Zips failed and every disk from now on went bad, just that one occurence was such a lifesaver for me, I would still harbour good thoughts!

In short, my experience with Zips has been excellent - would I like to have CD backup? Of course - but there is the problem of space and money at the moment.

In the meantime, I'll keep making by daily double backups on Zips and have faith, because nothing has happened to lead me to think otherwise.

No, I don't work for Iomega - I'm a Canadian, an author and a guy who once initialized his HD when he didn't intend to!

It's these late nights we all keep - just look at the times of postings on these forums - we should get a life and go to the dentist for some real fun!

WDL

Heh
The irony
I was just checking out this site that has a utility and a faq for Zip/Jaz users...
http://grc.com/clickdeath.htm

There is a utility there (windows, unfortunately) that lets you check your disks..

But the writer of said utility also goes to note that it's the poor quality of the DRIVES, NOT THE DISKS, that cause the problems.

I have just read this entire thread on Jaz/Zip disk/drive failures and am very shocked with the problems; I have a 5 year old Zip Drive (SCSI) with the original Zip disk that came with it and two others that are almost as old and have never had a single problem with any of the disks (and I know have 15 Zip disks). All my disks read as having 99% of their lifetime remaining and I have never found any issue with the drive or media connected with Speed Disk (I have used it from v.2.x to the current v.5.0.2). I have on occasion reformatted disks using a hacked version of Drive Setup, but always returned to formatting it with Iomega's software. I have heard rumour of Iomega media being problematic at times, but thankfully haven't been effected.

I will continue to use Iomega products (though for long term/permanent storage, I have a year old LaCie made CDR that has never been a problem (I'm lucky as I only seem to have 1 in 50 CDs fail in one way or other (always due to me not being on the ball when it's being created or when setting up the disk content in the first place (ie. not optimizing the source disk; I have even used a FireWire drive as the source disk without incident)).

[g4-guy]

Hi Folks,

I have a Fuji Zip disk that I have been using for a while and the disk life as well as the format life still appear to be 100%. I just bought a pack of Iomega brand Zips, but I haven't opened it yet. It will be interesting to find out how those hold up...

If you have a Zip or Jaz disk that has a low disk life, my suggestion would be to get a new disk to replace the old one, then use the Iomega Copy Machine (included with the free set of tools called IomegaWare) You can get IomegaWare from the Iomega web site

Regards,
g4-guy

well, any media is gonna fail after a while. i had some important stuff, so i backed it up on a zip and on a 400MB seagate scsi hard drive. what failed first? the hd. the zip is still going. well, when i got my burner, i burnt all my important stuff onto a cd-r and a cd-rw, just as an experiment. the cd-r is over with. (maybe cracking in half ruined it?) the rw is okay, but now i trust everything to the hd in my imac.

in all the time ive spent using zip drives, only one disk failed on me. and that was after going through the washing machine.

dabradda

Any official work from Iomega yet?

Not to beat a dead horse (or dead ZIP), but this topic also has posts on macfixit.com and macaddict.com.

My suggestion to anyone who is concerned with the problem write a letter to Iomega and give 'em hell!