> The Jaz drive was something that to me at least appears to be thrown
> together in response to other companies (Syquest in particular) offerings.
> I like the Zip drives I have, but I would never own any of the other
> iomega products.  They all seem just too flimsy.

When the Jaz drive came out, it was rather revolutionary since there wasn't
any consumer-level removable devices that had a capacity anywhere near 1G.
So if anyone is playing catch up, it is Syquest and the others.


> Putting source on a Jaz drive, and rebuilding /usr once or twice will
> almost always kill the cartridge.  They were intended for (rather than
> marketed as) occasional use media, like image archives and such, not
> as replacements for hard drives.


I only have 3 cartridges, but I have never had a major failure in over a
year of heavy duty use, and sometimes daily hauling the drive to and from
work.  I do have one cartridge that has a few bad blocks, as the result of
a head crash due to something akin to the "click of death", however. 

While I don't believe I have ever build the whole NetBSD tree off of a Jaz
disk, one of my Jaz drives (the 1G model) was a primary storage device
on the build machine used to create a popular Windoze game.  The nightly
builds went on for several months, and a single Jaz cartridge was used to
build the InstallShield disk image, then that image (~630M) was burnt
directly to a CD-R disc.  So if you are killing Jaz cartridges after one
or two builds, you must have really bad cartridges!

I definitely am not going to defend Iomega, and I have had a problem or two
with my Jaz drive, but the 1G Jaz drive isn't as bad as some people would
claim.  I don't have any experience with the 2G model, so YMMV.  



Jeff Thieleke