JAZ Drive
Removable Media Recovery - JAZ Drive
Jaz drive was a removable rigid disk (RRD) drive introduced by Iomega in 1995. It is based on hard disk drive technology that utilizes rigid platters. Jaz drive was originally released with a capacity of 1 GB and featured a 3 ½ -inch form factor. Later the capacity was increased to 2 GB in 1998.
Jaz drive consisted of two platters in a thick cartridge with sliding door. It had a reflective piece so that the drive may detect its capacity before loading. The drive contained the spindle motor, read/write heads, voice-coil actuator and drive controller. The disk spun at approximately 5000 RPM.
Jaz drive was a significant improvement over Iomega’s most popular Zip drive that used the floppy disk technology. Jaz drives were much more fragile than the Zip drives. The design of Jaz drives was much less prone to Click of death.
However, Jaz drives were also prone to certain defects. It may corrupt its own data, thus causing click of death, as a result of damaged read/write heads writing errors to Jaz cartridges, eventually corrupting them. Some of the earlier drives were prone to over heating while a few others were reported to have poor loading mechanism that sometimes made a cartridge stuck in the drive.
The Jaz drive utilized only the SCSI interface. To connect it to standard parallel port, it was provided with an adapter known as Jaz Traveller.
In spite of several advantages over Zip drives, Jaz never attained as much market penetration as the Zip drive. The Jaz line was discontinued in 2002.
