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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kashish King who wrote (48906)	2/26/1998 10:28:00 AM
From: Craig Richards	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58324

Consumers are usually willing to make trade offs for absolute reliability if they save lots of money. So while Zip might only be 99.9% reliable, it costs a lot less than the 100.0% reliable alternative. And Zip disks are also easy to transport and throw around, further adding to convenience. Zip has never been presented as the best technology, but rather as good technology hitting the right point on the consumer's price/performance curve. So even if Zip isn't 100% reliable, it offers what people want at a price they're willing to pay.

To: Kashish King who wrote (48906)	2/26/1998 11:07:00 AM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58324

>>Several articles have recently appeared which support the notion that they aren't anything but bastions of reliability. I came under fire for expressing precisely those same concerns and suggested that, barring the use of optical media, the use of multi-gigabyte, multi-track tapes provided a clear, present and superior solution. The response I received read something like this: Tapes is no good 'cuz they get loose 'n stuff. Zip disks is better.<< Rod - Funny, I thought we had cleared this misunderstanding up. I believe that you came under attack not for expressing concerns about Zip reliability, but for calling almost everyone on this thread "delusional, irrational and naive." That's a direct quotation from your post. You really can't expect people to be polite to you when you are rude to them. People who responded to your suggestion that tape is the most reliable storage medium said that tapes do fail, and that no large company ever relies on a single backup of any critical data no matter what media are involved. Your characterization of their responses not only demonstrates that you missed their points completely, but once again insults them. Anyway, what do the backup methods of big companies have to do with anything? If you want to talk about the relative reliability of backup solutions, you should be comparing the solutions designed for the same markets. Home users don't use $40,000 DLT tape changers, or optical media jukeboxes. - Allen

To: Kashish King who wrote (48906)	2/26/1998 1:08:00 PM
From: Troy Shaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58324

Rod, <<...'cuz they get loose 'n stuff>> It's more the "'n stuff" part. If tapes are so great, why did I just see an advertisement that read "Why do tapes fail 63% of the time." Why do you suppose DVD has a shot at replacing video tapes? Why did CD replace audio tapes? (Answering in the form of a question: Why do video tapes and audio tapes both degrade in quality the more they are used?) Part of it Rod, is that not only is the tape subject to stretching, but that the tape is dragged across the head, leaving part of itself on the head. That is why you have to clean audio and video heads every few hours. Same goes for computer tapes. When was the last time you purchased a $40,000.00 backup device for your home computer? Apples and oranges...

To: Kashish King who wrote (48906)	2/26/1998 3:49:00 PM
From: Eve Edelson	Respond to of 58324

Reliability; okay here No problems with zip reliability here, in either office or lab. As for backup, choice of media depends on what you're backing up. We find it handy to put results of different experimental runs on different zip disks. Obviously they're not for backing up some huge Unix box, tape is much cheaper, tho' a drag to use. Conversely, I don't need a "multi-gigabyte, multitrack tape" to back up 100MB of images which I want kept separate from run to run. Neither choice is necessarily a criticism of the other; it all depends on your situation. All this reminds me that I've had faulty tapes and hard drives. We had an IBM workstation which lost first one internal HD, than another, then the CD-ROM went, then the graphics board...sigh... The cost of storing "anything of material value" on zips is not prohibitive - if it were we couldn't afford them, we're just poor academics. Spare change for research?