<b>Views on using third party formatting and SCSI software with Jaz/Zip drives: a follow-up

Following up on a previous posting here at MacFixIt, Larry Melkus writes that FWB and La Cie told him that they know of no problems with their formatting software (HDT and Silverlining) on Jaz cartridges. However, Iomega posted the following additional explanation of their position:

"I strongly recommend you do not use FWB with our drives. You are literally playing Russian Roulette with your data. FWB (HDT) is a known conflict with our software. While it is a fine program, it keeps trying to take control of our drive and operate it. Our drives are made to be very friendly with other programs and if FWB takes over control it may operate it but you will have problems down the road because it was not made to operate our drives. It is our recommendation to disable FWB if you want to use our drives. You will save yourself a lot of headaches down the road. The driver that Images Tools writes to the disk creates a special track on the disks called the 'Z Track' that is used for on-the fly data recovery. The way it works is this: during the writing of a file to the disk, if the drive heads cross an area that the drive feels has lost integrity, that portion of the data will be rewritten to the 'Z Track' instead of writing over the questionable area like other drives do. This is done to preserve your data and map out questionable sectors on the disk. Other software programs do not have this function and that can cause you problems down the road. While FWB is a fine driver software, we hear horror stories everyday about what it does to peoples data when used with our drives. If you have formatted our disk with FWB we recommend take the data off the disk and re-format the disk with Iomega Tools. While we do not support using 3rd party software with our drives, Norton's Disk Doctor seems to work very well with our drives and disk. We have not encountered any problems associated with using NDD with our drives."