Iomega Corp has, as expected (CI No 2,680) launched itself into the high-capacity removable storage market with a 1Gb disk drive it is calling Jaz. The Roy, Utah company reckons the new drive is capable of storing and playing high quality audio and video on a single removable disk, yet cheap enough to provide home and small office computer users a powerful Winchester upgrade. The Jaz drive is still under development, but is expected to begin shipping by the end of the year at street prices as low as $500, with the removable cartridges at $100 a time. The company claims performance rivalling the best fixed hard drives – sustained transfer rate of up to 6.73M-bytes per second, 10M-byte per second SCSI transfer rate, 12mS average seek time, 17.5mS average access time, and has a 256Kb read-write cache. The external drive – in the 3.5 form factor – weighs 2 lbs, and uses tri-pad thin-film 50% recording heads, dynamic head loading and drag and drop motorised cartridge ejection. The 540Mb cartridges are expected to be $70, and you’ll need to buy a multi-pack to get 1Gb ones for $100. It is expected to be out in internal and external SCSI versions late this year, with internal IDE versions planned to follow early next year.
