Play jazz music with Jaz, but don't break the law

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): As you already know, the prices of hard disks have crumbled like the Berlin Wall in 1989. To our advantage, this coincides with our need for more and more storage space.

One thing we could do to fulfill this need is buy a second EIDE hard disk that would currently set us back about Rp 500,000. However, later on, when we eventually manage to fill it up with another 1.7 GB of data (and garbage), we may have to buy another hard disk of an even larger capacity. We may not shudder at the idea so much today, because we know it will come at yet a much lower price. The problem is, what to do with the old hard disks?

It may not appear much of a problem today, since your present PC can probably hold up to three IDE hard disks besides an IDE CD-ROM drive -- provided you can do magic and make them work together. But as my desk drawer will readily testify, today's hard disks are generally so well built that they don't die by the time we need to replace them with larger ones. I know it, as I have one 340 MB Quantum ProDrive hard disk that still works without a hiccup but I simply have no place for it on my PC. Wasted, it has ended up resting inside my drawer.

Not wanting to have to keep otherwise perfect hard disks in our drawers is one of the reasons that adding a removable storage device to our PC seems a viable alternative to forever buying new hard disks. Well, the low cost alternative is to build your own external hard disks using the external drive kits that I wrote about two weeks ago. The more elegant -- albeit costly -- solution would be to buy an Iomega Jaz, an external storage device that uses the Winchester technology to achieve the hard disk performance level.

Courtesy of PT Erijaya Karsamitra in Jakarta and Iomega Pacific, Pte. Ltd. in Singapore, I was able to play around with an external version of Iomega Jaz. Its Glodok price is about Rp 1.2 million.

With that price, I told the people from Iomega that it would be hard for them to compete with hard disks. Keep in mind that, in order to be able to use Jaz, a SCSI adaptor my have to be added to your system if you don't have one already. This will mean another investment of at least Rp 200,000.

Fortunately, Iomega assured me that the price will be slashed. In the last round, I noticed that some mail order houses in the U.S. offered this drive for a low US$369.

Portability

Despite the high price of a Jaz drive, there are specific situations that can easily justify such a hefty investment. For example, if you need portability, Jaz removable disks are small enough to fit into your shirt pocket. You can carry one with you to the service center or to a customer's office, and it will hold 1 GB of data. Even the external drive itself is no bigger than the popular ZIP drive from the same company. If you need it elsewhere, you could easily take it along with you. While you could carry around bare hard disks in your briefcase, installing them on the PC would be time-consuming and risky. With Jaz, all you have to do is insert the disk.

Another situation where Jaz is preferable is when you need to keep your sensitive data in a secured place. Just press the eject button on the drive's front panel, and you can pull the disk out and place it inside your safety box. Again, with removable hard disks the process would be more involved than just pressing one button.

Still another scenario for Jaz is when you regularly need to keep huge amounts of data in your filing system. You can buy extra Jaz disks as you need them. The current price of a Jaz disk at Glodok is around Rp 250,000.

The drives come in two versions, external and internal. Both use the SCSI interface. The one I tested was an external, portable version. In its quest to be different, Iomega calls the internal model "the Insider". What a name! Anyway, if you have an internal version, you can boot from it. The internal version has a lower price tag.

My test unit came complete with a SCSI II connector cable. Inside the box there was an interface adapter in case I had an older version of SCSI port -- the one that resembles the parallel port. It also came with a separate universal power adapter, which I believe should be a thing of the past. However, I guess Iomega has not been able to integrate it into the small drive housing because the heat it creates may harm the drive itself. Luckily the power adapter is not so big, so I shouldn't object so much.

Jaz is a SCSI device, and you can hook it up to a PC or to a Mac. There is also a second SCSI port at the back of the drive so you can attach other SCSI devices to create a daisy chain. It has automatic termination, so it's basically a plug-and-play device. It can take advantage of the Fast SCSI II interface, if you have one.

I tested my demo unit using a high end notebook from Siemens Nixdorf, the Scenic Mobile 700. I placed this notebook in its docking station, which had a SCSI interface. Then I connected the Jaz drive to the docking station. After I installed the right driver for the SCSI interface, everything worked as expected. It became drive E:, drive D: being the IDE CD-ROM drive.

Multimedia-ready

Unlike ZIP, which is basically a high-capacity diskette drive, Jaz is actually a removable hard disk. Look at these specs: The average seek time is 12 ms, the sustained transfer rates are 6.73 MB/sec (maximum), 5.51 MB/sec (average), and 3.53 MB/sec (minimum). Its burst transfer rate is 10 MB/sec. With this level of performance, Jaz can easily compete with real hard disks.

And because it is as quick as a hard disk, you can play multimedia with no annoying delays in data transfer. In fact, the Jaz Tools disk that came with the unit contained MusicNet Volume 1, Issue 4. It is a demo which has specially been made for Jaz. It contains a small portion of over 200 albums from almost every music style available on the full MusicNet CD-ROM. Once I had installed QuickTime on the notebook, I was able to play video clips from Herbie Hancock's Dis Is Da Drum as well as some audio clips from Willie Nelson's and Dolly Parton's albums.

If you download a lot of audio and video files from the Internet, you'll love Jaz. Just make sure you don't breach anybody's property rights.

The Jaz Tools disk also contains software drivers and tools for DOS, OS/2, Windows 3.x Mac OS and Windows 95. No Windows NT driver yet, though. You may have to download it from Iomega site.

Conclusion

When it becomes more widely available, the Universal Serial Bus -- like the SCSI interface -- will allow us to add more hard disks as the need arises. However, it is clear that there is always a market for removable hard disks like Jaz. As I mentioned earlier, it is the perfect choice when you regularly transport data in huge quantities or you need to keep your confidential data away from prying eyes. Our hope is that the Glodok price for this drive will soon go down to more affordable levels.

For merely backing up data, Jaz is obviously not the most cost-efficient solution. You may do better with a tape drive. It's much, much slower, but it's not as nearly expensive as Jaz.

Nonetheless, if you know your other half is a computer buff and would be exulted by a removable data storage as his or her Christmas present, Jaz would definitely make an immensely impressive gift under the tree.