http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/issues/1507/pcmg0026.htm (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
PC Magazine -- April 9, 1996
Alfred Poor
Iomega Corp. has finally begun shipping the Jaz Drive, its innovative removable hard disk system. Except for packaging considerations, the Jaz seems to have been worth the wait. This drive features shirt-pocket-size cartridges that can hold 1GB of data, but so far it's available only in internal configurations.
Micron Electronics was one of the first PC companies to include the Jaz Drive in its high-end systems; expect other vendors to follow in the near future. By the time this review appears in print, Iomega hopes to be shipping the external version of the drive, which was designed to be an add-on peripheral.
Identical except for packaging, the internal and external drives move data across a Fast SCSI-2 interface. The Jaz cartridge itself is a hybrid design that uses two platters of a special magnetic media stored in a hard plastic container. At a bit less than 4 inches square and less than half an inch thick, the cartridge is marginally bigger but much thicker than a standard floppy disk.
We tested the Jaz Drive with the $99 1GB cartridge on a Pentium/75 PC test-bed. Installation of the Jaz Drive was fairly easy and took about 10 minutes. The Jaz internal drive that we tested does not require a terminator, because the Iomega SCSI card comes with a special ribbon cable that includes a terminator at the end.
Software installation consisted of running a program from a floppy disk and then using an included cartridge that contains a variety of utility programs. You can unlock this cartridge so that you can use it to store your own data as well.
In addition to a basic configuration program, the Jaz system comes with Copy Machine, a program that makes it simple to copy either the contents of one cartridge to another using a single drive or the contents of any other drive on the system to a Jaz cartridge. Users in a hurry will find this is a quick and easy way to mirror a drive or copy an entire drive.
Because the Jaz disk spins at 5,400 rpm, the drive's specifications come close to those of a system's native hard disk. This translates into a 12-millisecond average seek time, an average sustained data-transfer rate of 5.5 megabytes per second (MBps), and a burst data throughput of 10 MBps. In addition, the drive comes with a 256-kilobyte (256K) on-disk buffer to speed performance.
In our evaluation test system, the Jaz posted a score of 415 kilobytes per second (KBps) on our Disk WinMark 96 benchmark tests, a result that lagged behind the 606-KBps data throughput for the system's Western Digital Caviar 2700 hard disk.
For sequential reads of 2K and 4K data, the Jaz was faster than the system's hard disk by about 10 percent.
The Jaz system has been designed for the long haul. According to Iomega's specifications, the drive has been designed to survive a 3-foot drop, up to a 3g shock while running, and up to 80g while not running; the cartridges come with a lifetime warranty. Road warriors will be comforted to know that the cartridges have been designed to work at altitudes up to 10,000 feet, which should be fine in a pressurized airline cabin--or on a mountaintop, for that matter.
In addition, you can use all the standard DOS disk utilities on the Jaz cartridges. The Jaz cartridges come preformatted as a single DOS partition, meaning that they use 16K per cluster, which can be wasteful if you intend to fill a cartridge with many small files.
We suggest that you use DOS's FDISK or Power Quest's PartitionMagic (First Looks, August 1995) to partition the cartridge into multiple drives with smaller clusters for greater efficiency. This means that you can set a cartridge up to have the same-size partitions as the hard disk on your system, making it easy to back up complete drives in an efficient manner.
At $99, the 1GB cartridge currently is not as inexpensive as various optical-disk removable read/write/erase products, but the Jaz has a significant performance advantage over these less expensive media devices. And at 10 cents per megabyte, the Jaz is much cheaper than even the least expensive hard disks.
Almost as fast as a hard disk yet priced competitively with the new high-capacity optical-media devices, the Iomega Jaz Drive is an attractive bargain for PC data backup as well as online storage of archival data. Now that it's finally shipping, the Jaz looks as if it could be a big hit.
Iomega Jaz Drive. Estimated street price: $599. Requires: PC with SCSI host or open ISA slot. Iomega Corp., Roy, UT; 800-697-8833, 801-778-1000.
Copyright (c) 1996
Ziff-Davis Publishing Company