Iomega Jaz

» see iomega.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the jaz drive was for american desktop power users with a scsi card and a video editing project. i was on a 33.6k modem in ankara with a regular hard drive. i knew the zip 100 well, you saw the blue cartridges at every internet cafe and every university kiosk by 2001, but the jaz lived one tier above what consumer turkey actually bought. it was the rich cousin of the zip.

iomega shipped the first jaz drive in december 1995. the design was a smart rethink of removable storage. instead of the floppy-style magnetic platter inside a plastic case that the zip used, the jaz cartridge contained a real rotating rigid disk, basically a portable hard drive in a slot. internal scsi-2 interface at 5400 rpm with 1 gigabyte per disk. the price at launch was around 500 dollars for the drive and 125 for a cartridge. that put it firmly in the prosumer bracket.

the use case was real for a few years. video editors with adobe premiere needed a way to move large raw files between machines, and small studios needed offline backups for audio and graphics work. the jaz was the only consumer-priced product that could hold a 1 gigabyte project file. by 1998 iomega had shipped a 2 gigabyte version and was selling drives by the warehouse to media production studios.

the cracks came from two directions. the click of death, a hardware failure where the head misaligned and started destroying both cartridge and drive, became a public relations problem on usenet and computer magazines. and the cd-r blank dropped from 5 dollars in 1997 to under 1 dollar by 1999. a cd-r held 700 megabytes and read on any computer with a cd drive. the jaz needed a 400 dollar drive at both ends. by 2001 the math was bad. iomega ended production in 2002 and replaced the line with the rev drive, which itself died in 2008.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

in 1996 and 1997 the jaz looked like the future. iomega was selling zip drives by the millions to consumer pc owners and the jaz was the natural premium upgrade. trade press covered the 1 gigabyte cartridge as a step change in personal storage. iomega's stock split twice on the strength of the storage business. inside the company, the jaz was the high-margin product the salespeople pitched into the professional market.

~ the unraveling ~

the click of death became the brand's signature failure mode. early jaz cartridges had a tolerance issue in the head loading mechanism. when the head jammed it would make a steady clicking sound, and the next thing you knew the cartridge was unreadable and the drive often took itself out trying to read another one. iomega initially denied the scale of the issue. court filings later showed it was widespread. on usenet the term click of death attached to iomega as a brand and never came off.

~ the long tail ~

by 2001 the cd-r and the cheap hard drive had eaten the addressable market. iomega filed quietly with smaller and smaller numbers each year. the jaz line ended in 2002. iomega itself was bought by emc in 2008 and the brand was absorbed into a server storage line that nobody remembered as a consumer product. somewhere in turkey there is probably still a jaz drive in an ankara university computer lab basement, under a printer, with a 1 gigabyte cartridge inside containing somebody's senior project from 2000.

~ what got buried with it ~

the jaz buried the whole concept of the high-capacity removable rigid cartridge for the consumer market. nothing replaced it at the same tier. usb thumb drives took over the sub-gigabyte slot. external usb hard drives took the bulk storage slot. the niche the jaz held, a fast removable disk you carried between two machines that ran like a local drive, just dissolved. that idea now belongs to network file shares and cloud sync. the cartridge format is gone for good.

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