To Dr. Benway about my experience with Zips/Jaz
Hello Dr.,
At home I have a zip and a 1GB-Jaz. The zip works fine. The Jaz sometimes makes a whiny noise on startup, not mechanical but like electrical noise. That is if there is no Jaz cartridge in it. If I flip it off and on again, or put a cartridge in it, the noise goes away. Anyway, it works fine but I consider that noise a possible defect, but I don't know yet.
At work, one of my research groups has 10 zip drives or so, all work fine. The other group has I think 6 zips (parallel, scsi, ide), and one 1-GB Jaz, and I have a zip and 1-GB Jaz at work myself. One zip broke from being tossed around in the laboratory oo much. The Jaz (again), this one from LaCie, had a fan problem which was replaced but it seems to be happening again. Fans seem to be failing around here lately - in Jaz drives, hard disks, computers. Anyway, the zip/jaz drives all work. No media problems since we started getting Iomega products, it must be almost 2 years ago now.
My institution, a large-ish R&D facility, has anointed a certain configuration of Micron PC as the standard for new purchases, and it contains an internal zip.
So I think it's an OK way to go. I carry files back & forth between home & office on a zip. A nice solution.
If you start having to move many gigs of files, a tape drive would be cheaper.
Well, there you have it in glorious detail. Hope it helps. |
