Sorry to hear you problems but you seem to know the value of back ups.
We used to use zips a lot. Every internal drive we installed (probably 6 or 7) failed within a year. The externals were much more reliable but “click death” killed a few. And a damaged cartridge could kill several drives before the problem was detected.
The “Jazz” was terrible. You could not reliably share a cartridge between drives. We installed 3 of these and sent them back within a month. Iomega was less than helpful.
In short, I do not trust Iomega products.
My experience with lacie has been the opposite of yours. We have at least 10 of the D2 250 and 500 gig drives. The oldest (3+ years) are out in the field constantly. We lost 1 due to pilot error. And lost a few power supplies, But the D2 series drives have been bullet-proof for us.
joe