Fast, high-capacity removable storage hits a high note.
Kristina DeNike
Rating: Very Good/Outstanding (4.5 of 5 mice)
Combining the convenience and affordability of its predecessor -- the Zip drive -- with remarkable speed, upped capacity, and superior design, the Jaz removable-cartridge drive looks like another well-deserved hit for its manufacturer, Iomega. The drive, with its sub-$100 1-GB cartridges, is sure to appeal to anyone who works with large files, particularly folks in multimedia development and prepress.
Built for Speed
You won't have to compromise speed for price with the Jaz drive: It's the fastest removable-media drive you can buy. In our MacBench 3.0 Disk Mix test, the Jaz drive was 37 percent faster than the previous speed leader among removable-media drives, the 270-MB SyQuest drive, and more than three times as fast as the Zip drive. Results were even more dramatic in our MacBench 3.0 Publishing Disk Mix test, in which the Jaz was 58 percent faster than the SyQuest 270. (We tested the Jaz using the default driver settings, which, like those for the tested reference drives, had the write-verification option turned off. When we turned write verification on, as Iomega recommends for greatest data security, the Jaz's speed dropped by about 18 percent but was still greater than that of the SyQuest 270 with write verification off.)
Despite these impressive scores, Iomega's claim that the Jaz is faster than most hard drives isn't applicable to most current drives. A 1-GB Quantum hard drive in a Power Mac 7500/100 easily beat the Jaz in the Disk Mix and Publishing Disk Mix tests. The Jaz drive did, however, come close to hard-drive speed when writing large (1 MB) data chunks sequentially to disk, which means it would be well suited for digital-video-editing work.
If you work with large files, such as digital-video clips, you may want to consider Iomega's Jaz Jet, a $100 Fast SCSI PCI card. The Jet card improved speed on reads and writes larger than 1 MB in size; on the other hand, it slowed down the small reads and writes that are typical with word-processor and spreadsheet documents. If you live and breathe for fast throughput, you might consider one of the Jaz bundles from ProMax, MicroNet, or FWB -- each of which offers two Jaz drives with RAID 0 software.
Built to Last
You don't have to compromise on design or durability with the Jaz drive. Unlike the Zip drive, which offers only two SCSI IDs and 25-pin SCSI connectors, the Jaz drive has eight SCSI IDs and two SCSI-II HD-50 connectors. The HD-50 connectors provide excellent data security, but they're not commonly used in the Mac market, so you need to use an adapter -- which Iomega includes -- to plug the Jaz drive into a Mac. If you want to hook it into a SCSI chain that has more devices, cabling can get complicated. You don't have to worry about getting an HD-50 terminator, however, because the Jaz drive has built-in termination.
The 8-x-1.5-x-5.5-inch drive is small and light enough to carry around. You can't orient the case vertically, but even if you could, you wouldn't be able to use it, because the drive heads wouldn't work in that position.
To test Jaz-cartridge durability, we heated the cartridges up to 185 degrees Fahrenheit with 95-percent humidity and also dropped them onto a metal surface from a height of 2.5 feet. The cartridges came through essentially unscathed -- a bit scuffed but with data intact.
The Jaz drive comes with the same easy-to-use formatting software as the Zip drive, and in fact, you can use the same software for both. One minor disappointment: You can't use the software to format a Jaz cartridge for use with PC-compatible computers. If Iomega truly wants its removable-media systems to become the floppy drives of the future, it needs to give its Mac clientele the ability to transfer data to PCs.
The Bottom Line
Iomega's inexpensive Zip drive was a runaway mass-market hit last year, but its relatively low-capacity, 100-MB cartridges made it impractical for large files such as digital-video and -audio clips. Jaz cartridges deliver much more storage capacity than do the highest-capacity SyQuest discs, and the drive is fast, reliable, and reasonably priced. Later this year, SyQuest plans to release its retort to the Jaz drive: the SyJET drive, which will use 1.3-GB cartridges. Producing a drive that combines speed and ease of use as well as the Jaz drive does should be a challenge for SyQuest -- and a boon for consumers.
Iomega's Jaz drive and cartridges are conveniently portable.
Rapid Removables / how Jaz plays
The Iomega Jaz compares favorably to the previous speed leader among removable-media drives, the SyQuest 270. (SyQuest 270 mechanisms are sold only in third-party drives; we tested a Power User drive, from MacWarehouse). All systems were tested on a Power Mac 7500/100's built-in SCSI chain, with write verification in the default "off" setting. MacBench 3.0 scores are relative to those of the Power Mac 6100/60 with an internal 250-MB Quantum drive, which is assigned a score of 10.0 in each test.
