greetings all, I have an Akai S3000 Sampler and was looking at purchasing a Zip drive but I have recently been offered a second hand Jazz Drive which takes 2gb disks. This seems like a pretty good deal to me but I have been told they are known to be unreliable and chew disks, has anyone had any experience with Jazz drives that could offer any advice. I will also be usng it with a Mac if that makes any difference

curious, why not go with CDRW?

I'm with WS, though additional HDD's are an even better option. On the PC side, 40 gig IDE drives are readily available for under $150, and that's a bunch o' CDs with a read-write speed a quantum leap over any back-up solution.

Jazz media aren't actually disks, they're tape cartridges, so they're desperately slow. Zip and Jazz were viable solutions 3+ years ago, but with decent CDR-W and up-and-coming DVD-RW, it doesn't make sense to invest in a proprietary media format that's slow.

KMFDM lost an album's worth of material to a jazz drive (the symbols album from about 1998). I've also heard about them crashing a lot in other situations. Personally, I'd avoid them.

Avoid Jazz drives at all costs!!! Not only is the media unreliable but so are the drives. I work for an ad agency that used to use them and we finally ditched every single one of the worthless things we had (about two dozen!) in favor of CDRW's. Zips are okay also.