Zip disks, Jaz cartridges and early external drives are now decades old, and what is on them has usually been forgotten rather than duplicated. That is precisely why these arrive — someone found a box and remembered what was in it.
Iomega was folded into LenovoEMC and wound down, so firmware, drivers and replacement enclosures no longer exist. What still turns up is a perfectly serviceable disk stranded behind a dead bridge board.
Iomega has not existed as an independent brand since LenovoEMC absorbed it, and nothing new carries the name. What that means practically is that every Iomega device reaching this bench is old, and the data on it is usually old too — archives, business records, photograph collections from the 2000s.
That changes the character of the work. These are rarely urgent jobs. They are jobs where somebody has found a box in a loft or an office cupboard and discovered that the only copy of something important is on hardware nobody has supported for fifteen years.
Most of it is recoverable. The formats are well documented and the underlying storage is conventional; the difficulty is interfaces and drive families that stopped being made.
Zip and Jaz cartridges Removable magnetic media from the 1990s. The click of death on Zip drives was a real and documented mechanical fault.
eGo portable drives 2.5-inch USB and FireWire externals. Conventional drives in Iomega enclosures.
Home Media Network Drive Single-disk NAS units running Linux. Standard ext-based layouts, readable outside the unit.
StorCenter ix2 and ix4 Multi-bay NAS. mdadm arrays that reassemble on other hardware without the original chassis.
Prestige and Select desktop 3.5-inch mains-powered externals. Test the power supply before assuming the disk.
REV and Ditto tape Backup formats now genuinely obsolete. Readable, but the drives to read them are the constraint.
The common assumption with Iomega equipment is that because nothing supports it any more, the data has gone with it. That is rarely true. Zip cartridges, StorCenter arrays and eGo drives all use documented formats and conventional magnetic storage, and none of them becomes unreadable simply because the manufacturer disappeared.
What has disappeared is the equipment to read them, which is a different problem and one we keep hardware for. Send a photograph first if you are not certain what you are holding — several Iomega products look similar and the format matters more than the badge.
We have the drives. Zip media holds up reasonably well in storage and the format is documented. Send the cartridges rather than hunting for a reader.
Yes, and it was a genuine mechanical fault. A clicking Zip drive can also damage the cartridge in it, so do not keep trying different disks in the same drive.
The disks are readable without it. These are standard mdadm arrays that reassemble on other hardware.
Usually. Magnetic media degrades slowly in reasonable storage conditions. Optical media from that era fares considerably worse.
From £250 +VAT for cartridges and single media, £300 +VAT for drives, £500 +VAT for multi-bay units.