Comment by to11mtm

Some Jaz Drives suffered from problems that could vaguely sound like (but were fairly physically different from) Click-Of-Death. We had an early one, they got announced around 95 and I think we got one in 97 to replace tapes... alas when we actually needed to read data... Dad had to redo all his MIDIs because of that one. (Ironically none of our Zip drives failed and he used one up sometime between Vista and Win10... I think the same one...) [0][1].

> no CDRW yet (only CDR, at 5 bucks a piece).

IIRC Jaz cartridges were expensive back then, 100$ a pop. Launch price of 100$, back then 500$ could buy you a car that might last through an oil change or two. [1]

That said, The Castlewood Orb was a far more interesting piece of machinery due to capacity/cost. I have never seen one, but I do have a SyJet somewhere that I never hooked up to a PC [2]

[0] - FWIW the Jaz in question was a SCSI model with parallel port adapter. Not sure if it makes a difference...

[1] - It took a long time to fully reclaim my dad's confidence in purchase suggestions, wasn't finally conquered till a year after he ditched a problematic Chrysler Sebring for a Chevrolet Malibu (at which point he said I was glad I suggested it. Which I'm eternally grateful for...)

[2] - Got it used cheap way back when, I preferred SCSI CDRWs and thus had at least one competent Adaptec card for the task and a colleague was like 'hey since you can use it...'