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IOMega Jaz Drive repair or toss?

R

rvdbijl

Experienced Member
Joined
May 8, 2017
Messages
112
Location
NH, USA
Hi All,

An old PC I bought off eBay a while back had a SCSI 1GB Jaz and Zip drive in it. I recently bought some media for it and got the Zip drive working no problem. But the Jaz drive won't spin up. When inserting the cartridge, you can hear the insertion mechanism whirr for a short time, and then a very faint sound can be heard, but definitely not the usual loud Jaz spin-up sound. Looking at the drive, there is nothing obviously wrong with it. The insert / eject mechanism works fine, and of the two cartridges I have, none spin up.

Does anyone have thoughts about how to attempt to diagnose / repair this drive? Or is it not worth it and should I just toss it?

Thanks!
 
Chuck(G) said:
Depends on your level of experience and capabilities.
Click to expand...

Ha! I am always up for a challenge... But I draw the line at soldering SMT components. But I do have scopes and other diagnostic tools if this happens to be a common failure mode for these drives.
 
As far as I'm aware, most Jaz drives encounter mechanical failures, not electrical.

So, if this were my drive, I'd start by checking out the spindle motor transistors. You do realize that most of the PCB in a Jaz drive is SMT, don't you?
 
I do.. I was hoping it might be a sensor that gets obstructed or damaged in these drives. I'll see if I can figure out where the motor drive transistors are... Otherwise I guess it's into the garbage with this thing...
 
From what I read the Zip100 was the most reliable of the ilk, not that it was bullet-proof, and the JAZ drives least robust: Late in the production cycle and competing with falling prices for IDE equipment, the objective appears to have been to make a cheap drive.

Why would you want to put anything on a drive that might fail at any time? It's not as if it were essential to the operation of any other equipment. Let it go...

-CH-
 
I keep a few Jaz drives around because I'm called on occasionally (last time was 3 months ago) to retrieve data from them. Interestingly, this was Mac HFS, not PeeSee FAT.

I still have that blunder of Syquest, the Sparq, in its original bubble pack. To date, I've never had to use it. Why Syquest didn't introduce a SCSI or IDE external version puzzled a lot of people. It was a reliability disaster and probably was the straw that broke Syquest's back.
 
Syquest wanted people to buy the more expensive Syjet which had both internal and external SCSI versions. Alas, the Syjet was just as unreliable as the Sparq. Jaz was much better than either. I went for the Orb before the revised production line ensured rapid drive failure. Zip was surprisingly reliable considering the low price.

Most of these problems had minor causes and could have been solved by a few weeks of testing and about a dollar of parts. It is difficult to convince anyone to pay $50 to $150 for a disk after the drive fails.
 
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