I have seen a few ads of zip, ditto, and jaz drives in the Computer Shopper magazine, July'96. I found the Jaz article that you may be interested to know. It is page# 258 in that magazine.
Iomega Jaz Drive: Inexpensive Multimedia Storage By the GB
By Sheldon Leemon
If you had to design the perfect storage device for multimedia and professional use, you'd probably come up with something very similar to Iomega's new Jaz drive. The Jaz is small (about the same size as a 3.5-inch floppy drive), light-weight (under 2 pounds) and fast (about the same speed as a fixed SCSI hard drive). It's available in both inernal 3.5-inch and external configurations, for either IBM-compitable or Macintosh computers. And it uses removable 1GB cartridges that are approximately the size of three floppies stacked together -- giving it virtually unlimited storage capacity. Best of all, the Jaz is very affordable. At $500 to $600 for the first gigabyte, the drive isn't much more expensive than a fixed SCSI hard disk. Buy another four cartridges, and you've gotten 5GB of storage for less than $1,000 -- a bargain by any measure.
Installation and setup of the Jaz drive under Window 95 was straight plug and play. Since our P120 test system already had a properly configured Adapter 2920 SCSI host adapter, Windows automatically recognized the Jaz as a removable media drive as soon as it was plugged in. Even under Windows 3.x or DOS, however, the process isn't much more complex.
The setup software includes a number of useful utilities. The Guest program, for instance, makes it simple to swap portable drives between computers. Copy Machine lets you copy the contents of an entire drive --either from one Jaz cartridge to another, or between the Jaz and a hard drive. Other utilities make the drive appear as a fixed disk, provide for software write protection with or without a password, format the drive, and check the drive's status.
Since the Jaz usse Winchester hard drive technology, it's not surprising tha its performance, like fixed SCSI hard drives, is faster than most IDE drives. It was able to play back a 640x480 video clip from the WinBench 96 test suite, streaming 900K of data at 15 frames per second--without dropping a frame. As a backup drive, he Jaz copies 15MB to 20MB of data per minute from a hard drive.
The Jaz is the perfect storage device for multimedia. As an AV-rated drive, it doesn't pause for recalibration (as do mos hard drives) which can result in dropouts when storing audio or video material. Each carridge can accommodate up to two hours of CD-quality audio or one hour's worth of VHS-quality, 30-frames-per-second video. Also, if you're mastering CD-ROMs, you can use a separae cartridge for each disc. It is equally useful, however, fo routine backup tasks and archival storage of important business data. As sensational as Iomega's previous Zip drive was, the Jaz gives you 10 times the storage (at much higher speeds) for less than three times the cost. In an industry where change is measured almost daily, we believe the Jaz drive is likely to set the standard for a long time to come. |
