It never ceases to amaze me when enthusiasts like iDB reader Niles Mitchell manage to get some outdated, ancient technology running with a modern day iPhone. In the latest installment to his “Will it Work?” series, Mitchell connects his iPhone to Iomega’s SCSI Jaz Drive.
The Jaz drive was the big brother to Iomega’s way more popular Zip drive.
But unlike Zip drive that used a floppy disk media, the Jaz Drive uses a more reliable, more capacious hard drive media. As a larger capacity, faster and more expensive version of the Zip drive, the Jaz drive was geared more towards professionals.
Niles has connected an old Jaz drive to his iPhone and documented the whole process in a nine-minute video that I’ve embedded right ahead. Watch it now to see what he used to make this SCSI-only device (there was never a USB version) work with his phone via USB.
“Now that I know that the ORB SCSI to USB adapter works on other manufacturer’s devices, there will be lots of goodies to come,” Niles told me via email.
Watch other videos from his “Will It Work” series to see an iPhone working with things like Sony’s Walkman, Apple’s iPod nano music player, Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, a PSP console and even a Casio graphing calculator. Niles was also able to connect his Apple Watch to an Iomega Zip drive and even burn a CD using his Apple Watch, with a little bit of trickery.
Thanks to the iOS 13 and iPadOS software updates, the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices can now connect to external storage media, either directly (via the USB-C port on your iPad Pro) or indirectly (the Lightning port on other iOS devices) with a dongle.
Doin so enables you to do things like access your DSLR photos on a memory card, but you can also connect a good ol’ USB thumb drive and copy files from and to it in the much-improved Files app on iOS 13 and iPadOS.
The feature also enables better workflows because apps like Lightroom for iOS can now directly import images and bypass the iOS camera roll. Not only do imports happen faster, they also don’t require the extra space taken up by having a duplicate copy placed in the camera roll.
Let us know what you think about the “Will it Work?” series in the comments down below.