Iomega JAZ Drive
Iomega released the 1GB JAZ Hard Disk removable cartridge drive system in 1995, and releasing an updated 2GB version in 1998 (which is fully backward compatible with 1GB cartridges). Iomega made the JAZ in both internal (SCSI & IDE in 3.5″ form factor) and external (SCSI & Parallel) configurations.
I use these for mass storage, backup, and data transfer on most of my vintage SCSI equipped computers like vintage Apple II and Macintosh computers, and even a few of my SCSI equipped vintage PCs. These drives are typically quite inexpensive on the 2nd hand market, I have 2x 2GB and 3x 1GB drives and a large stack of cartridges in both 1GB and 2GB capacities.
Being a removable hard disk platter based system, the drives and disks, when inserted should be handled gently as you would any hard disk, however when handled with care I have found these to be much more reliable than Iomega’s ZIP drive offering.
External 2GB SCSI JAZ Drive
I was just reading your comments above and I wonder if you can help me out. I have been trying to get my Jaz drive to work on my //GS for a couple of days now with no luck. Did you have to do anything special to get the Apple // to work with the Jaz drive? Mine (attached via Apple SCSI Rev C) can see that the drive is there but isn’t able to initialized or partition.
Any clues?
Mine is working just fine on my Apple SCSI Rev C, I did have to initialize/format the disk on the IIgs, it couldn’t be done on a PC or Mac, I do not honestly recall if I used the Apple SCSI utilities or Copy II Plus to format it.
You could also be looking at a termination issue, I know the Apple SCSI cards have issues with certain termination settings, namely they will NOT bus power a terminator, the terminator must be DEVICE powered, I believe I am using the “Term ON” setting (switch in “I” position) on the Jaz drive, and no external terminators (and no other devices in the SCSI chain).