The Jaz drive is a removable

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

storage system sold by the Iomega company from 1995 to 2002. Following the success of the Iomega

Zip drive The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was announced by Iomega in 1994 and began shipping in March 1995. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities ...

, which in its original version stores data on high-capacity floppy disks with 100 MB nominal capacity, and later 250 and then 750 MB, the company developed and released the Jaz drive. First shipping to OEMs in December 1995, the Jaz drive featured 1 GB capacity per removable disk. A new Jaz drive model, released in February 1998, increased the individual disk capacity to 2 GB. The Jaz drive uses a

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...

interface, with both internal and external drive models. Iomega produced a Jaz Jet SCSI adapter

PCI PCI may refer to: Business and economics * Payment card industry, businesses associated with debit, credit, and other payment cards ** Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, a set of security requirements for credit card processors * Prov ...

card for PCs. Iomega also produced a number of external adapters, including the Jaz Traveller interface that connected it to a standard

parallel port In computing, a parallel port is a type of interface found on early computers ( personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals. The name refers to the way the data is sent; parallel ports send multiple bits of data at once (paralle ...

, and, later, a SCSI-USB adapter and SCSI-Firewire adapter. An ATA version of the drive was planned but never released.

Reception

The Jaz never attained as much success or market penetration as the Zip drive. While the Zip drive was marketed as a high-capacity

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...

for the home and

small office/home office Small office/home office (or single office/home office; sometimes short SOHO) refers to the category of business or cottage industry that involves from 1 to 1000 workers. In New Zealand, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBI ...

(SOHO) markets, the Jaz drive was originally advertised as a higher-end product. SCSIs were standard in

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

computers but were rare in the much larger market of end-user PCs, usually requiring an extra interface card to be bought and installed. The rising popularity and decreasing price of

CD-R CD-R (Compact disc-recordable) is a digital media, digital optical disc data storage device, storage format. A CD-R disc is a compact disc that can only be Write once read many, written once and read arbitrarily many times. CD-R discs (CD-Rs) ...

CD-RW RW (Compact Disc-Rewritable) is a digital media, digital optical disc data storage device, storage format introduced by Ricoh in 1997. A CD-RW compact disc (CD-RWs) can be written, read, erased, and re-written. CD-RWs, as opposed to CDs, r ...

drives greatly hurt the success of the Jaz drive, offering a much lower price-per-megabyte and the convenience of the CD media being readable in almost any standard CD-ROM drive.

Problems

Earlier Jaz drives could overheat, and loading-mechanism jams could leave a disk stuck in the drive. This became known in the profession as the "click of death", because of clicking sound it made as it tried and failed to eject the disc. Forcibly ejecting a stuck disk could destroy both the drive and disk. Jaz drives are hard-disk technology, making them susceptible to contaminants in the drive; dust and grit could be introduced through a hole in the disk case where the motor drove the platters, and any dust built up on the external case could enter the drive with its next insertion. Additionally, the metal sliding door was capable of wearing the plastic, resulting in debris and

head crash A head crash is a hard-disk failure that occurs when a disk read-and-write head, read–write head of a hard disk drive makes contact with its rotating hard disk platter, platter, slashing its surface and permanently damaging its magnetic media ...

es. Furthermore, the mechanism used to attach the platters to the spindle motor was complex and tended to vibrate noisily. Iomega implemented an anti-gyro device (much like an optical CD/DVD drive) within the cartridge to prevent vibration at spin-up, but this device lost effectiveness with age. As a result, the two platters could lose alignment, rendering the cartridge unusable. The plastic tabs attached to the bottom of a Jaz cartridge could become stripped or broken, rendering the inserted disk physically incapable of spinning up to operating speed. Some drives also had

firmware In computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, h ...

problems.

Legacy

The later Iomega REV drive tried to use similar technology to address the same market segment that the Jaz drive had reached. The REV's design is derived partly from the IBM 2310's use of a "voice coil actuator (VCA) motor to improve the reliability and reduce the seek time of an HDD's read–write heads" in a removable media cartridge. It also is derived from the IBM 3340's use of "low-cost, low-load, landing read/write heads with lubricated disks". Neither the Jaz drive nor the REV drive copied the IBM 3340 in making the heads a part of the cartridge, although the REV drive moved the motor into the cartridge—which the IBM 3340 had not done. It was left to the RDX Technology drive to move the heads into the cartridge, which increased reliability by essentially making the cartridge an electro-mechanical duplicate of a modern external disk drive.

References

{{Iomega storage devices Iomega storage devices Hard disk drives Computer-related introductions in 1995

Reception

Problems

Legacy

See also

References