Jaz 1 GB and 2 GB drives

Read about Removable storage here.

The Jaz 1GB drive was the first product of this type from Iomega, which is no longer manufacturing it. The newer Jaz 2GB become the flagship of Iomega's removable storage products.

Jaz disks can be used to store, backup, and move large office application files, digital music, presentations, digital photos, digital video, and to provide back-up for your OS. These products are much closer to the category of 'backup' storage than the infamous Zip drives and have relatively large storage capacity even by today's standards.

On the other hand, with the modern hard drive capacities exceeding 20 GB, back-up with Jaz 2 GB disks is too expensive. One will need to spent about $1500 (including the cost of the drive itself) to back up a 20 GB hard drive. It is much cheaper to, for example, buy 1 more hard drive and back up you data on it, or, just go with tape storage.

Jaz drives come with ultra-SCSl interface connector and require a separate SCSI card (unless you use Macintosh!). They provide a 'hard-drive-level' average seek time and a high data transfer rate. A good thing about 2 GB drives that they work with both 1GB and 2 GB disks!

Warning! Do not use 2 GB disks with 1 GB drives! It may cause damage to the drive. While admitting that the Jaz 2 GB drive is the correct and logical next step after Zip drive, we have to mention, that it is also, somewhat of a step back in terms of compatibility. Unlike the over 20 million Zip drives (mostly 100 MB) sold along with over 100 million Zip disks, Jaz 2 GB drives and disks are still relatively rare and they require a SCSI card. Therefore, moving your data onto Jaz is not as straight forward a procedure as when you use parallel port Zip drives.

Compare different removable storage systems here!

Compare different Iomega removable storage products here!

Design concept

The Iomega Jaz drive is almost the hard drive. It uses hard, thin-film magnetic disks (unlike Zip drives which uses flexible particulate media). Its 3.5 inch (~95 mm) disks spin at respectable 5394 RPM. Jaz drives use load/unload technique like the most advanced hard drives for mobile computers and servers. But, there should be no questions: in terms of their performance, Jaz drives fall behind real hard drives. Even if the Jaz drive's average seek time seems quite acceptable (10 ms read / 12 ms write compared to, for example, 7.6 to 8.0 ms average seek time for Seagate Barracuda ATA IDE drives spinning at 7200 RPM), its average data transfer rate (7.4 MB/sec) is below the level offered by hard drives (again, using Seagate Barracuda ATA IDE Series drive as an example, its average sustained data transfer rate is above 15 MB/sec). On the other hand, we are talking about transferring 2 GB of data only...

The Jaz drive's areal recording density is also low by today's standards providing 1 GB per platter (disk) when the disk drive manufacturers are continuously pushing the limit to far beyond 5 GB per platter (disk). It is also quite expensive.

The main challenge for removable drives comes from contamination. Four magnetic heads in the Jaz 2 GB drive (one head per disk surface) are flying over the rigid magnetic disks at velocities (about 5400 RPM) comparable to that in the fixed hard drives, but the environment they operate in is much dirtier. The durability of the head - disk interface depends strongly on the absence of particulate contamination in the disk atmosphere and on the surfaces of the disk and slider.