Hello Garden!
Has anyone had experience with backing up to Iomega Jaz drive cartrages? The only reason I ask here is because I hate asking in the Apple forums because everyone asks why do I even have that... Using this through SCSI not Parallel. BTW I bought this in an ebay auction b/c i thought it had the usb to SCSI adapter in the auction but i was wrong.. Is it worth the trouble? Thought I'd keep it around jic i get an old 68k or a Nubus PM..
Hi, no experience with these, sorry. Just to say 1 GB (its the 1 GB Jaz drive?) of backed up classic Mac software is a lot of data. Plus you can exchange disks carts in the one drive. That, and it should be useful to use with Macs from the Mac Plus thru to the PCI Macs including the Beige G3. So I'd keep it around just for that.
The one good thing I can say about Iomega was their stuff was cheap. My failure rate on ZIP disks was on par with my failure rate of floppy disks - which was "rather often".
As a data transfer mechanism, they're great. But don't rely on ZIP (and by extension: JAZ) drives for your backups.
Gary
Backing up to Jaz drives is like backing up to those old 5 1/4 Apple II disks...
Is it worth the trouble?
... I think not.
Just one more consideration, speed. From memory Jazz and Zip are about as fast as floppy disk.
There's also a reason (or three) why both disappeared overnight with the advent of CD-R - speed, cost, reliability.
To be fair, Zip disks (I still have a mountain of Zip 250's) and never had a failure on any of them - still have the external Zip250 drive and another built-in to my DA533x2. They were many, many time more reliable than floppy.
and never had a failure on any of them
For me, it was the SCSI drive that fails. Later USB ZIP drive is still working now.
Aint got experience with Jaz drives either, but never had a failing SQ400 or Sony EDM640B after twenty years of storage.
I dont think its a bad idea to store backups on magnetical media, if you have more than one device for reading them and/or do create images of your media. Your files from the images can be read in worst case with an Intel Mac or an emulator.
>never had a failure on any of them
Actually now that you mention it, that may be true for me as well. It may have been the drives themselves (NOT the disks) that failed. Can you say "Click of death"?
But it is VERY difficult to actually know for sure if the "Click of Death" was a drive failure or a disk failure.
Gary
Agreed, Gary.
Could you try the removable in another drive? I am dumping my SQ400´s right now and took some of them apart, because my wife wants the platters. (Dont ask me...) There is not much in a SyQuest cartridge, that could break at all. They were made pretty solid too, brass rivets and such. I recall rescueing files with SUM2 from a cartridge that had been messed up by user and/or OS. If a cartridge was ejected by brute force, before the OS was finished with it, strange things were bound to happen.
For the SQ555 at least, it was easy enough to tell whether the drive was good.
Those drives told your ears what was going on or going wrong. 
