History (1997): Iomega Recalls 75,000 Defective Jaz Disks

The manufacture of removable hard disk cartridges is a delicate business, more so when the cartridge contains two platters.

Iomega just learned the hard way, and so must replace around 75,000 3.5-inch Jaz disks, 20,000 in the U.S. alone.

The majority of these were provided to distributors and had not yet been sold to consumers, according to Iomega.

The cartridges in question are dated from March 13 to April 20, 1997, with serial numbers below the date ending in MS.

[It must have be a coincidence: we asked Iomega for a tour of its Penang, Malaysia factory, where, among other things, it manufactures the cartridges, just a few weeks prior, and were never answered. Ed.]

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 112, published on May 1997.