Iomega Representative Comments on IomegaWare, slow drive problems

An Iomega representative who wishes to remain anonymous has sent MacFixIt additional insight on the previously reported IomegaWare preference display and slow drive problems affecting Zip removable media congifurations.

"Thought I'd clear up a bit of the confusion concerning our new IomegaWare version 4.0.2.

"In this version of Tools, the Preferences menu is greyed out because the functionality is not there yet. In the OS 9 version of Tools, the Preferences allowed you to do such things as choose whether to eject your disk at Restart, Shutdown, the time for your drive to sleep, etc.. These features are not implemented in OS X yet, so the Preferences option is greyed out. Should we have removed the menu option? Perhaps.

"As for the Jaguar support - yes, this version (4.0.2) has been fully tested with Mac OS 10.2 - in fact, some of the features (custom media icons) only work in OS 10.2 and later.

"On the issues of 'slow' drives in Jaguar, the issue isn't Iomega's fault, but the PC Exchange functionality in Jaguar - we are not the only ones experiencing this. Any PC formatted media first goes through the fsck_msdos before mounting, and then writing seems to be about half the speed it was in10.1 and earlier. Another issue is the known one where 100MB media is in a250 drive. Due to the different head design, Iomega has to write the data in two passes, effectively halving the speed. If you're writing a file to a 250 drive with 100MB PC formatted media, it can be a painful experience."

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