My jb3 was a workhorse too.... it worked flawlessly for a long time.... like over 2 years, until finally one day it started to have problems when I was taping Duo... Ed showed me how to reformat, and that made it work well again, but I had to reformat regularly after that. Before that show, I had not ever reformatted or defragged the drive.
Since then I've gotten a whole new rig, w/ an R-1, and I also tape in small shithole bars w/ terrible sound, and I still like the sound of my 24-bit recordings more. However, since every aspect of my rig changed all at once, its difficult for me to single out the change from 16bit to 24bit as the most significant upgrade.
I do believe that the modSBM-1 may not have been the right peice of gear *for me*....